An Empirical Study on Performance Comparison of Lucene and Relational Database

Abstract

Lucene and relational database (RDB) are the two types of the most popular back-end toolkits for Web applications nowadays, which are mainly used to store and query data. However, it is often difficult for users and developers to make a decision to choose Lucene or RDB as their data repository, since they have only a conceptual understanding on difference between them. And the detailed performance comparison between Lucene and RDB is absent as yet. In this paper, we make an empirical study on performance comparison of Lucene and RDB by using experiments on a common test data set. The experimental results show that each of them has advantages and disadvantages in different application scenarios. These results can be used to help users and developers make a more advisable decision when facing different application requirements.