<chapter id="introduction">
 <title>Introduction</title>

  <section id="overview">
   <title>Overview</title>
   <para>
    &zebra; is a free, fast, friendly information management system. It can
    index records in &acro.xml;/&acro.sgml;, &acro.marc;, e-mail archives and many other
    formats, and quickly find them using a combination of boolean
    searching and relevance ranking. Search-and-retrieve applications can
    be written using &acro.api;s in a wide variety of languages, communicating
    with the &zebra; server using industry-standard information-retrieval
    protocols or web services.
   </para>
   <para>
    &zebra; is licensed Open Source, and can be
    deployed by anyone for any purpose without license fees. The C source
    code is open to anybody to read and change under the GPL license.
   </para>
   <para>
    &zebra; is a networked component which acts as a
    reliable &acro.z3950; server
    for both record/document search, presentation, insert, update and
    delete operations. In addition, it understands the &acro.sru; family of
    webservices, which exist in &acro.rest; &acro.get;/&acro.post; and truly
    &acro.soap; flavors.
   </para>
   <para>
    &zebra; is available as MS Windows 2003 Server (32 bit) self-extracting
    package as well as GNU/Debian Linux (32 bit and 64 bit) precompiled
    packages. It has been deployed successfully on other Unix systems,
    including Sun Sparc, HP Unix, and many variants of Linux and BSD
    based systems.
   </para>
   <para>
    <ulink url="http://www.indexdata.com/zebra/">http://www.indexdata.com/zebra/</ulink>
    <ulink url="http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/win32/">http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/win32/</ulink>
    <ulink url="http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/debian/">http://ftp.indexdata.dk/pub/zebra/debian/</ulink>
   </para>

   <para>
    <ulink url="http://indexdata.dk/zebra/">&zebra;</ulink>
    is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text
    indexing and retrieval engine. It reads records in a
    variety of input formats (e.g. email, &acro.xml;, &acro.marc;) and provides access
    to them through a powerful combination of boolean search
    expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.
   </para>

   <para>
    &zebra; supports large databases (tens of millions of records,
    tens of gigabytes of data). It allows safe, incremental
    database updates on live systems. Because &zebra; supports
    the industry-standard information retrieval protocol, &acro.z3950;,
    you can search &zebra; databases using an enormous variety of
    programs and toolkits, both commercial and free, which understand
    this protocol.  Application libraries are available to allow
    bespoke clients to be written in Perl, C, C++, Java, Tcl, Visual
    Basic, Python, &acro.php; and more - see the
    <ulink url="&url.zoom;">&acro.zoom; web site</ulink>
    for more information on some of these client toolkits.
   </para>

   <para>
    This document is an introduction to the &zebra; system. It explains
    how to compile the software, how to prepare your first database,
    and how to configure the server to give you the
    functionality that you need.
   </para>
  </section>

  <section id="features">
   <title>&zebra; Features Overview</title>

   <section id="features-document">
    <title>&zebra; Document Model</title>

    <table id="table-features-document" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; document model</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Complex semi-structured Documents</entry>
	<entry>&acro.xml; and &acro.grs1; Documents</entry>
	<entry>Both &acro.xml; and &acro.grs1; documents exhibit a &acro.dom; like internal
	 representation allowing for complex indexing and display rules</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="record-model-alvisxslt"/> and
	 <xref linkend="grs"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Input document formats</entry>
	<entry>&acro.xml;, &acro.sgml;, Text, ISO2709 (&acro.marc;)</entry>
	<entry>
	 A system of input filters driven by
	 regular expressions allows most ASCII-based
	 data formats to be easily processed.
	 &acro.sgml;, &acro.xml;, ISO2709 (&acro.marc;), and raw text are also
	 supported.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="componentmodules"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Document storage</entry>
	<entry>Index-only, Key storage, Document storage</entry>
	<entry>Data can be, and usually is, imported
	 into &zebra;'s own storage, but &zebra; can also refer to
	 external files, building and maintaining indexes of "live"
	 collections.</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>

      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>

   <section id="features-search">
    <title>&zebra; Search Features</title>

    <table id="table-features-search" frame="top">
    <title>&zebra; search functionality</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Query languages</entry>
	<entry>&acro.cql; and &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf;</entry>
	<entry>The type-1 Reverse Polish Notation (&acro.rpn;)
	 and its textual representation Prefix Query Format (&acro.pqf;) are
	 supported. The Common Query Language (&acro.cql;) can be configured as
	 a mapping from &acro.cql; to &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf;</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-query-languages-pqf"/> and
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-cql-to-pqf"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Complex boolean query tree</entry>
	<entry>&acro.cql; and &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf;</entry>
	<entry>Both &acro.cql; and &acro.rpn;/&acro.pqf; allow atomic query parts (&acro.apt;) to
	 be combined into complex boolean query trees</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-rpn-tree"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Field search</entry>
	<entry>user defined</entry>
	<entry>Atomic query parts (&acro.apt;) are either general, or
	 directed at user-specified document fields
	</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-atomic-queries"/>,
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-use-string"/>,
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-bib1-use"/>, and
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-idxpath-use"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Data normalization</entry>
	<entry>user defined</entry>
	<entry>Data normalization, text tokenization and character
	 mappings can be applied during indexing and searching</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="fields-and-charsets"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Predefined field types</entry>
	<entry>user defined</entry>
	<entry>Data fields can be indexed as phrase, as into word
	 tokenized text, as numeric values, URLs, dates, and raw binary
	 data.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="character-map-files"/> and
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-pqf-apt-mapping-structuretype"/>
	</entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Regular expression matching</entry>
	<entry>available</entry>
	<entry>Full regular expression matching and "approximate
	 matching" (e.g. spelling mistake corrections) are handled.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-regular"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Term truncation</entry>
	<entry>left, right, left-and-right</entry>
	<entry>The truncation attribute specifies whether variations of
	 one or more characters are allowed between search term and hit
	 terms, or not. Using non-default truncation attributes will
	 broaden the document hit set of a search query.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-bib1-truncation"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Fuzzy searches</entry>
	<entry>Spelling correction</entry>
	<entry>In addition, fuzzy searches are implemented, where one
	 spelling mistake in search terms is matched</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-bib1-truncation"/></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>

   <section id="features-scan">
    <title>&zebra; Index Scanning</title>

    <table id="table-features-scan" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; index scanning</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Scan</entry>
	<entry>term suggestions</entry>
	<entry><literal>Scan</literal> on a given named index returns all the
	 indexed terms in lexicographical order near the given start
	 term. This can be used to create drop-down menus and search
	 suggestions.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-operation-type-scan"/> and
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-atomic-queries"/>
	</entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Facetted browsing</entry>
	<entry>available</entry>
	<entry>Zebra 2.1 and allows retrieval of facets for
	 a result set.
	</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-attr-scan"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Drill-down or refine-search</entry>
	<entry>partially</entry>
	<entry>scanning in result sets can be used to implement
	 drill-down in search clients</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-attr-scan"/></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>

   <section id="features-presentation">
    <title>&zebra; Document Presentation</title>

    <table id="table-features-presentation" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; document presentation</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Hit count</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry>Search results include at any time the total hit count of a given
	 query, either exact computed, or approximative, in case that the
	 hit count exceeds a possible pre-defined hit set truncation
	 level.</entry>
	<entry>
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-local-attr-limit"/> and
	 <xref linkend="zebra-cfg"/>
	</entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Paged result sets</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry>Paging of search requests and present/display request
	 can return any successive number of records from any start
	 position in the hit set, i.e. it is trivial to provide search
	 results in successive pages of any size.</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>&acro.xml; document transformations</entry>
	<entry>&acro.xslt; based</entry>
	<entry> Record presentation can be performed in many
	 pre-defined &acro.xml; data
	 formats, where the original &acro.xml; records are on-the-fly transformed
	 through any preconfigured &acro.xslt; transformation. It is therefore
	 trivial to present records in short/full &acro.xml; views, transforming to
	 RSS, Dublin Core, or other &acro.xml; based data formats, or transform
	 records to XHTML snippets ready for inserting in XHTML pages.</entry>
	<entry>
	 <xref linkend="record-model-alvisxslt-elementset"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Binary record transformations</entry>
	<entry>&acro.marc;, &acro.usmarc;, &acro.marc21; and &acro.marcxml;</entry>
	<entry>post-filter record transformations</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Record Syntaxes</entry>
	<entry></entry>
	<entry> Multiple record syntaxes
	 for data retrieval: &acro.grs1;, &acro.sutrs;,
	 &acro.xml;, ISO2709 (&acro.marc;), etc. Records can be mapped between
	 record syntaxes and schemas on the fly.</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>&zebra; internal metadata</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry> &zebra; internal document metadata can be fetched in
	 &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes. Those are useful in client
	 applications.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>&zebra; internal raw record data</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry> &zebra; internal raw, binary record data can be fetched in
	 &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes, leveraging %zebra; to a
	 binary storage system</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>&zebra; internal record field data</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry> &zebra; internal record field data can be fetched in
	 &acro.sutrs; and &acro.xml; record syntaxes. This makes very fast minimal
	 record data displays possible.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="special-retrieval"/></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>

   <section id="features-sort-rank">
    <title>&zebra; Sorting and Ranking</title>

    <table id="table-features-sort-rank" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; sorting and ranking</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Sort</entry>
	<entry>numeric, lexicographic</entry>
	<entry>Sorting on the basis of alpha-numeric and numeric data
	 is supported. Alphanumeric sorts can be configured for
	 different data encodings and locales for European languages.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-sorting"/> and
	 <xref linkend="querymodel-zebra-attr-sorting"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Combined sorting</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry>Sorting on the basis of combined sorts ­ e.g. combinations of
	 ascending/descending sorts of lexicographical/numeric/date field data
	 is supported</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-sorting"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Relevance ranking</entry>
	<entry>TF-IDF like</entry>
	<entry>Relevance-ranking of free-text queries is supported
	 using a TF-IDF like algorithm.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-dynamic"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Static pre-ranking</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry>Enables pre-index time ranking of documents where hit
	 lists are ordered first by ascending static rank, then by
	 ascending document ID.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="administration-ranking-static"/></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>


   <section id="features-updates">
    <title>&zebra; Live Updates</title>


    <table id="table-features-updates" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; live updates</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Incremental and batch updates</entry>
	<entry></entry>
	<entry>It is possible to schedule record inserts/updates/deletes in any
	 quantity, from single individual handled records to batch updates
	 in strikes of any size, as well as total re-indexing of all records
	 from file system. </entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="zebraidx"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Remote updates</entry>
	<entry>&acro.z3950; extended services</entry>
	<entry>Updates can be performed from remote locations using the
	 &acro.z3950; extended services. Access to extended services can be
	 login-password protected.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="administration-extended-services"/> and
	 <xref linkend="zebra-cfg"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Live updates</entry>
	<entry>transaction based</entry>
	<entry> Data updates are transaction based and can be performed
	 on running  &zebra; systems.  Full searchability is preserved
	 during life data update due to use  of shadow disk areas for
	 update operations. Multiple update transactions at the same
	 time are lined up, to be performed one after each other. Data
	 integrity is preserved.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="shadow-registers"/></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>

   <section id="features-protocol">
    <title>&zebra; Networked Protocols</title>

    <table id="table-features-protocol" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; networked protocols</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Fundamental operations</entry>
	<entry>&acro.z3950;/&acro.sru; <literal>explain</literal>,
	 <literal>search</literal>, <literal>scan</literal>, and
	 <literal>update</literal></entry>
	<entry></entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="querymodel-operation-types"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>&acro.z3950; protocol support</entry>
	<entry>yes</entry>
	<entry> Protocol facilities supported are:
	 <literal>init</literal>, <literal>search</literal>,
	 <literal>present</literal> (retrieval),
	 Segmentation (support for very large records),
	 <literal>delete</literal>, <literal>scan</literal>
	 (index browsing), <literal>sort</literal>,
	 <literal>close</literal> and support for the <literal>update</literal>
	 Extended Service to add or replace an existing &acro.xml;
	 record. Piggy-backed presents are honored in the search
	 request. Named result sets are supported.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="protocol-support"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Web Service support</entry>
	<entry>&acro.sru;</entry>
	<entry> The protocol operations <literal>explain</literal>,
	 <literal>searchRetrieve</literal> and <literal>scan</literal>
	 are supported. <ulink url="&url.cql;">&acro.cql;</ulink> to internal
	 query model &acro.rpn;
	 conversion is supported. Extended RPN queries
	 for search/retrieve and scan are supported.</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="zebrasrv-sru-support"/></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>

   <section id="features-scalability">
    <title>&zebra; Data Size and Scalability</title>

    <table id="table-features-scalability" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; data size and scalability</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>No of records</entry>
	<entry>40-60 million</entry>
	<entry></entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Data size</entry>
	<entry>100 GB of record data</entry>
	<entry>&zebra; based applications have successfully indexed up
	 to 100 GB of record data</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Scale out</entry>
	<entry>multiple discs</entry>
	<entry></entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Performance</entry>
	<entry><literal>O(n * log N)</literal></entry>
	<entry> &zebra; query speed and performance is affected roughly by
	 <literal>O(log N)</literal>,
	 where <literal>N</literal> is the total database size, and by
	 <literal>O(n)</literal>, where <literal>n</literal> is the
	 specific query hit set size.</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Average search times</entry>
	<entry></entry>
	<entry> Even on very large size databases hit rates of 20 queries per
	 seconds with average query answering time of 1 second are possible,
	 provided that the boolean queries are constructed sufficiently
	 precise to result in hit sets of the order of 1000 to 5.000
	 documents.</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Large databases</entry>
	<entry>64 bit file pointers</entry>
	<entry>64 file pointers assure that register files can extend
	 the 2 GB limit. Logical files can be
	 automatically partitioned over multiple disks, thus allowing for
	 large databases.</entry>
	<entry></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>

   <section id="features-platforms">
    <title>&zebra; Supported Platforms</title>

    <table id="table-features-platforms" frame="top">
     <title>&zebra; supported platforms</title>
     <tgroup cols="4">
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="feature"/>
      <colspec colwidth="1*" colname="availability"/>
      <colspec colwidth="3*" colname="notes"/>
      <colspec colwidth="2*" colname="references"/>
      <thead>
       <row>
	<entry>Feature</entry>
	<entry>Availability</entry>
	<entry>Notes</entry>
	<entry>Reference</entry>
       </row>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
       <row>
	<entry>Linux</entry>
	<entry></entry>
	<entry>GNU Linux (32 and 64bit), journaling Reiser or (better)
	 JFS file system
	 on disks. NFS file systems are not supported.
	 GNU/Debian Linux packages are available</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="installation-debian"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Unix</entry>
	<entry>tar-ball</entry>
	<entry>&zebra; is written in portable C, so it runs on most
	 Unix-like systems.
	 Usual tar-ball install possible on many major Unix systems</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="installation-unix"/></entry>
       </row>
       <row>
	<entry>Windows</entry>
	<entry>NT/2000/2003/XP</entry>
	<entry>&zebra; runs as well on Windows (NT/2000/2003/XP).
	 Windows installer packages available</entry>
	<entry><xref linkend="installation-win32"/></entry>
       </row>
      </tbody>
     </tgroup>
    </table>
   </section>


  </section>

  <section id="introduction-apps">
   <title>References and &zebra; based Applications</title>
   <para>
    &zebra; has been deployed in numerous applications, in both the
    academic and commercial worlds, in application domains as diverse
    as bibliographic catalogues, Geo-spatial information, structured
    vocabulary browsing, government information locators, civic
    information systems, environmental observations, museum information
    and web indexes.
   </para>
   <para>
    Notable applications include the following:
   </para>


   <section id="koha-ils">
    <title>Koha free open-source ILS</title>
    <para>
     <ulink url="http://www.koha.org/">Koha</ulink> is a full-featured
     open-source ILS, initially developed  in
     New Zealand by Katipo Communications Ltd, and first deployed in
     January of 2000 for Horowhenua Library Trust. It is currently
     maintained by a team of software providers and library technology
     staff from around the globe.
    </para>
    <para>
     <ulink url="http://liblime.com/">LibLime</ulink>,
     a company that is marketing and supporting Koha, adds in
     the new release of Koha 3.0 the &zebra;
     database server to drive its bibliographic database.
    </para>
    <para>
     In early 2005, the Koha project development team began looking at
     ways to improve &acro.marc; support and overcome scalability limitations
     in the Koha 2.x series. After extensive evaluations of the best
     of the Open Source textual database engines - including MySQL
     full-text searching, PostgreSQL, Lucene and Plucene - the team
     selected &zebra;.
    </para>
    <para>
     "&zebra; completely eliminates scalability limitations, because it
     can support tens of millions of records." explained Joshua
     Ferraro, LibLime's Technology President and Koha's Project
     Release Manager. "Our performance tests showed search results in
     under a second for databases with over 5 million records on a
     modest i386 900Mhz test server."
    </para>
    <para>
     "&zebra; also includes support for true boolean search expressions
     and relevance-ranked free-text queries, both of which the Koha
     2.x series lack. &zebra; also supports incremental and safe
     database updates, which allow on-the-fly record
     management. Finally, since &zebra; has at its heart the &acro.z3950;
     protocol, it greatly improves Koha's support for that critical
     library standard."
    </para>
    <para>
     Although the bibliographic database will be moved to &zebra;, Koha
     3.0 will continue to use a relational SQL-based database design
     for the 'factual' database. "Relational database managers have
     their strengths, in spite of their inability to handle large
     numbers of bibliographic records efficiently," summed up Ferraro,
     "We're taking the best from both worlds in our redesigned Koha
     3.0.
    </para>
    <para>
     See also LibLime's newsletter article
     <ulink url="http://www.liblime.com/newsletter/2006/01/features/koha-earns-its-stripes/">
      Koha Earns its Stripes</ulink>.
    </para>
   </section>


   <section id="kete-dom">
    <title>Kete Open Source Digital Library and Archiving software</title>
    <para>
     <ulink url="http://kete.net.nz/">Kete</ulink> is a digital object
     management repository, initially developed  in
     New Zealand. Initial development has
     been a partnership between the Horowhenua Library Trust and
     Katipo Communications Ltd. funded as part of the Community
     Partnership Fund in 2006.
     Kete is purpose built
     software to enable communities to build their own digital
     libraries, archives and repositories.
    </para>
    <para>
     It is based on Ruby-on-Rails and MySQL, and integrates  the &zebra; server
     and the &yaz; toolkit for indexing and retrieval of it's content.
     Zebra is run as separate computer process from the Kete
     application.
     See
     how Kete <ulink
      url="http://kete.net.nz/documentation/topics/show/139-managing-zebra">manages
      Zebra.</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
     Why does Kete wants to use Zebra?? Speed, Scalability and easy
     integration with Koha. Read their
     <ulink
      url="http://kete.net.nz/blog/topics/show/44-who-what-why-when-answering-some-of-the-niggly-development-questions">detailed
      reasoning here.</ulink>
    </para>
   </section>

   <section id="reindex-ils">
    <title>ReIndex.Net web based ILS</title>
    <para>
     <ulink url="http://www.reindex.net/index.php?lang=en">Reindex.net</ulink>
     is a netbased library service offering all
     traditional functions on a very high level plus many new
     services. Reindex.net is a comprehensive and powerful WEB system
     based on standards such as &acro.xml; and &acro.z3950;.
     updates. Reindex supports &acro.marc21;, dan&acro.marc; eller Dublin Core with
     UTF8-encoding.
    </para>
    <para>
     Reindex.net runs on GNU/Debian Linux with &zebra; and Simpleserver
     from Index
     Data for bibliographic data. The relational database system
     Sybase 9 &acro.xml; is used for
     administrative data.
     Internally &acro.marcxml; is used for bibliographical records. Update
     utilizes &acro.z3950; extended services.
    </para>
   </section>

   <section id="dads-article-database">
    <title>DADS - the DTV Article Database
     Service</title>
    <para>
     DADS is a huge database of more than ten million records, totalling
     over ten gigabytes of data.  The records are metadata about academic
     journal articles, primarily scientific; about 10% of these
     metadata records link to the full text of the articles they
     describe, a body of about a terabyte of information (although the
     full text is not indexed.)
    </para>
    <para>
     It allows students and researchers at DTU (Danmarks Tekniske
     Universitet, the Technical College of Denmark) to find and order
     articles from multiple databases in a single query.  The database
     contains literature on all engineering subjects.  It's available
     on-line through a web gateway, though currently only to registered
     users.
    </para>
    <para>
     More information can be found at
     <ulink url="http://www.dtic.dtu.dk/"/> and
      <ulink url="http://dads.dtv.dk"/>
    </para>
   </section>

   <section id="uls">
    <title>ULS (Union List of Serials)</title>
    <para>
     The M25 Systems Team
     has created a union catalogue for the periodicals of the
     twenty-one constituent libraries of the University of London and
     the University of Westminster
     (<ulink url="http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ULS/"/>).
      They have achieved this using an
      unusual architecture, which they describe as a
      ``non-distributed virtual union catalogue''.
    </para>
    <para>
     The member libraries send in data files representing their
     periodicals, including both brief bibliographic data and summary
     holdings.  Then 21 individual &acro.z3950; targets are created, each
     using &zebra;, and all mounted on the single hardware server.
     The live service provides a web gateway allowing &acro.z3950; searching
     of all of the targets or a selection of them.  &zebra;'s small
     footprint allows a relatively modest system to comfortably host
     the 21 servers.
    </para>
    <para>
     More information can be found at
     <ulink url="http://www.m25lib.ac.uk/ULS/"/>
    </para>
   </section>

   <section id="various-web-indexes">
    <title>Various web indexes</title>
    <para>
     &zebra; has been used by a variety of institutions to construct
     indexes of large web sites, typically in the region of tens of
     millions of pages.  In this role, it functions somewhat similarly
     to the engine of Google or AltaVista, but for a selected intranet
     or a subset of the whole Web.
    </para>
    <para>
     For example, Liverpool University's web-search facility (see on
     the home page at
     <ulink url="http://www.liv.ac.uk/"/>
      and many sub-pages) works by relevance-searching a &zebra; database
      which is populated by the Harvest-NG web-crawling software.
    </para>
    <para>
     For more information on Liverpool university's intranet search
     architecture, contact John Gilbertson
     <email>jgilbert@liverpool.ac.uk</email>
    </para>
    <para>
     Kang-Jin Lee
     has recently modified the Harvest web indexer to use &zebra; as
     its native repository engine.  His comments on the switch over
     from the old engine are revealing:
     <blockquote>
      <para>
       The first results after some testing with &zebra; are very
       promising.  The tests were done with around 220,000 SOIF files,
       which occupies 1.6GB of disk space.
      </para>
      <para>
       Building the index from scratch takes around one hour with &zebra;
       where [old-engine] needs around five hours.  While [old-engine]
       blocks search requests when updating its index, &zebra; can still
       answer search requests.
       [...]
       &zebra; supports incremental indexing which will speed up indexing
       even further.
      </para>
      <para>
       While the search time of [old-engine] varies from some seconds
       to some minutes depending how expensive the query is, &zebra;
       usually takes around one to three seconds, even for expensive
       queries.
       [...]
       &zebra; can search more than 100 times faster than [old-engine]
       and can process multiple search requests simultaneously
      </para>
      <para>
       I am very happy to see such nice software available under GPL.
      </para>
     </blockquote>
    </para>
   </section>
  </section>

  <section id="introduction-support">
   <title>Support</title>
   <para>
    You can get support for &zebra; from at least three sources.
   </para>
   <para>
    First, there's the &zebra; web site at
    <ulink url="&url.idzebra;"/>,
     which always has the most recent version available for download.
     If you have a problem with &zebra;, the first thing to do is see
     whether it's fixed in the current release.
   </para>
   <para>
    Second, there's the &zebra; mailing list.  Its home page at
    <ulink url="&url.idzebra.mailinglist;"/>
     includes a complete archive of all messages that have ever been
     posted on the list.  The &zebra; mailing list is used both for
     announcements from the authors (new
     releases, bug fixes, etc.) and general discussion.  You are welcome
     to seek support there.  Join by filling the form on the list home page.
   </para>
  </section>
 </chapter>
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