Bringing Information Retrieval Back to Database Management Systems

Information retrieval emerged as independent research area from traditional database management system more than a decade ago. This was driven by the increasing functional requirements that modern full text search engines have to meet. Current Database Management Systems (DBMS) are not capable of supporting such flexibility. However, with the increase of data to be indexed and retrieved and the increasing heavy workloads, modern search engines suffer from scalability, reliability, distribution and performance problems. The DBMS have a long tradition in coping with these challenges. Instead of reinventing the wheel, the paper proposes using current DBMS as backend to existing full text search engines.