DTSearch on multiple computers

With large data sets, it is often necessary to allow the index to be accessed by multiple workstations.

 However, due to the nature of a large data set, it may be made up of many indexes, generally stored in the same location as the data. Registering these indexes can be a chore if there are more than a couple of machines.

If the index is made in Forix, the forensic version of DTSearch, each set of indexes is set up with a library (.lib) file, which contains the names and locations of each portion of the indexes. This helps because you only have to add these library files to DTSearch to register the entire forix index. by mapping the same drive letter to all the machines you need to use, you can use the same library file on each computer.

To speed this process further if you have multiple library files/indexes, you can copy the registry settings in HKEY_CURRENT_USER for DTSearch and register these on each machine. This will place the same references to the library files on each machine. Voila! You have multiple machines working from the same data set.

Let me know if you need any help for this. Martin.Nikel@gmail.com

DTSearch and Long File names

We have built some bespoke apps on DTSearch, and its a smooth engine, but there are a couple of bugbears that we have had to work around.

These are not DTSearch problems, but just data problems.

 1. Long filenames.  We often move the data from a disc to a SAN, under some extra subfolders. This pushes the path length above the maximum. Windows then struggles to recognise these files and DTSearch can’t see them either. Therefore we move them to a higher level. I wondered if there is any application out there that can access and index files that are longer than the maximum length. I know there is a Linux version of DTSearch… does this help?

 2. Data files.
DTSearch indexes the records in MDBs, CSVs etc as individual documents. We now how to stop this, but I wondered what the purpose of this functionality was?

3. Zip files.

On a large data set, there is nothing worse than having to unzip everything first. However, it would be nice if there was a feature to stop DTSearch indexing the files within a zip file as separate entities. Does anyone know how to do this?

4. MSG Files

When extracting resulting files from DT Search, with HTML MSGs it has the annoying habit of exporting as a folder with constituant parts. I don’t know the solution for this problem. We want it to extract the original file! Help!

Martin.