User manual

3
Installing Koha's Zebra
Search Engine
You will need to use Koha's Zebra search engine if you have more than say 10,000
catalog records. Without Zebra, catalog search results may be too slow.
If you have a small catalog you can use Koha without Zebra, in fact earlier
versions of Koha did not have Zebra. Without Zebra both installation and ongoing
maintenance will be simpler. However you should consider using Zebra even for
small catalog sizes because of Zebra's superior capabilities.
In this chapter we will learn more about Zebra and how to install and test it.
About Zebra
From the website of Indexdata, the organization behind Zebra:
"Zebra is a high -performance, general -purpose structured text indexing and
retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (eg. email,
XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact Boolean search expressions
and relevance -ranked free -text queries."
In our experience with Koha, we find Zebra to be an excellent search engine:
It is fast and efficient
It can index large databases
It can index bibliographic, authority, and holdings records
It is Unicode compliant and can work with any language
It is highly configurable; you can index any MARC field, set up numeric,
word, or phrase indexes, or configure ranking and sorting