620760 - Find a way to make manufacturers and devices searchable more easily

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Input :: General, defect, P2)

Description

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Currently, we hard-code every known manufacturer and device in order to be able to search for them, as search works something like:

"Samsung" -> CRC32 -> Sphinx: search for this number.

So we need to know what to look for in order to make Sphinx search for this.


I propose we find a way to automate this somehow. Two ideas:
- auto-generate the list of "known" devices from the feedback database, and keep it in memcache for a long time. This adds a performance hit to one request, but should be relatively slim since we'll add an index to the manufacturer / device field.
- search case-insensitively. My Samsung device sends "samsung" as its manufacturer, and I don't think this can currently be found, because our this spelling is not in the "known" list.

Comment 1

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

We can do this via redis.

Comment 2

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> We can do this via redis.

We should talk one of these days (tomorrow?) about what redis can do for us. Another option would be migrating to mongodb, but that involves getting rid of all MySQL-ness in our code. So if adding redis to the mix is a less invasive change, that'd be the way to go.

If redis also helps us do something useful in bug 623650, thumbs up.

Comment 3

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

I'd rather not abort mysql - it does what it's doing well.

I'd have all submissions trigger a post-save hook that just adds random metadata to redis.

Think of redis as memcached with pythonic like structures: lists, sets, dictionaries, etc.

Comment 4

[Aakash Desai [:aakashd]]

There's a lot of messages on mobile that are unknown. It's been like that for awhile and it's just going to get worse. We should nip this in the bud before it gets really bad.

Comment 5

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

This isn't an issue anymore since we no longer use Sphinx search. Closing out as WORKSFORME.