Today I came across a wonderful Hibernate extension called Hibernate Search. If you have ever developed a web application with Hibernate which offered search, then you might have experiences the painful text search implementation with SQL/HQL. The truth is, SQL does not address the problem of text search in a way as we are accustomed to from Google Search. Just writing generic queries using like expressions with wildcards does not fulfil performance requirements.

This problem is actually addressed by Lucene. However, in a web application were the domain model is a key part of the business logic, Lucene is not easy to integrate. Problem such as structural mismatch, synchronization mismatch, and retrieval mismatch have to be solved. To bridge the gap and to provide the best things from both worlds, Lucene is now integrated into Hibernate. Search queries can be issued against the database or against Lucene in a transparant way. Search performance increases a lot and the developer has a very comfortable way to state queries and to provide results.