Managing Index Search

To use index search, you must create and manage the index. Other administrative tasks related to index search include controlling the scope of the index, adjusting results relevance, suggesting content, and integrating with and publishing index content to third-party search engines.

Search results depend on the access permissions of the person who indexes the content as well as the user who searches the content.

Search activity in the portal can be restricted to index search only. Name, description, and name or description search can be disabled. For more information, see Restricting searches of IBM Cognos content.

Search results include report content that is archived to an external repository. For more information, see Searching archived content.

For information about the index and search rules that apply to IBM Cognos Workspace workspaces, see Index and Search Rules for Workspaces.

Performance Considerations

Some index search settings may also impact overall IBM Cognos Business Intelligence performance. We recommend that you use the default configuration settings for the index update service, index data service, and index search service until you gain experience using index search in your IBM Cognos environment. You can change default settings later to change specific behavior or improve performance.

Initial indexing and index updates can take a considerable amount of time depending on your data set and the system resources available. You can change configuration settings to reduce indexing time for some types of installations and if sufficient system resources are available.

The default settings for the index update service and index data service assume that index search services share a common Java™ instance with other IBM Cognos services. For this type of installation, changes to default settings for index search to reduce indexing time can have a negative impact on overall IBM Cognos BI performance.

Deploying search services in their own Java instance can significantly improve both indexing and search performance.

We recommend that you make minor adjustments to the default settings, changing only one setting at a time, and then determining if the change reduces indexing time before making additional changes.