About Horizon Index Services

Horizon Index Services is an indexing and searching utility that you use to build the keyword index for Information Portal. It also processes the searches that use the index. You can run Horizon Index Services on any machine that meets certain requirements. Unlike standard Horizon indexes, the index you create with Horizon Index Services is stored to files on the hard drive of the machine where you install Horizon Index Services, not in the Horizon database. (For system requirements and installation instructions for Horizon Index Services, see the Horizon Application Suite Installation and Upgrade Directory.)

Horizon Index Services consists of three components: the Horizon Indexer, the Horizon Index Server, and the Horizon Search Server. The Indexer and Index Server build the index. The Search Server processes search requests.

To build the index, the Indexer extracts data from your Horizon database (based on the index definition you created in the word_index table). The Indexer then processes the data and sends it to the Index Server. The Index Server creates the index and saves the indexing data to the index. This diagram shows how Horizon Index Services builds an index using the Indexer and the Index Server:

When a user submits a keyword search in Information Portal, Information Portal sends the search request to the Search Server. The Search Server processes the request, queries the index, and sends a list of bib keys that match the search criteria back to Information Portal. Information Portal then retrieves the bib records from the Horizon database. This diagram shows how keyword searches in Information Portal are processed:

 


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