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I've been down the full text search path a few times; never fun, too many compromises and too much work. Just last week I used Sunspot solr http://github.com/outoftime/sunspot for a new site and wow, what a breath of fresh air. Its the first turnkey FTS I've found. Sunspot is a ruby lib built on solr's ruby lib. But it comes with solar embedded in the gem, scripts to startup/shutdown, complete config files...it just works!!! Add to that, my new app needed to do FTS for Chinese. I was expecting headaches and digging through Java XML hell...nope, it just worked.

Well, you can't have it both ways. You have to do that with MySQL or any other database server, if you're being your own sysadmin. If you really don't want to deal with it, then you need to hire someone to manage it or use something like Heroku.

Another one is Xapian (http://xapian.org/), but really why not postgres - it has very high-performance full-text search built in.