Purging the Search Collection

You can purge the contents of the search collection. You might want to purge the cluster in staging or development systems, or if you want to clean out the search collection without re-installing all the nodes. Purging (and rebuilding) the search collection may also be useful in a dire situation where the contents of the cluster are corrupted beyond repair and good checkpoints are not available for recovery.

As a safeguard against purging the collection by accident, all cluster nodes must be in standby mode.

The Command Line Admin Utility is located in bin\native folder in the Search Service installation folder (for example, C:\bea\alui\ptsearchserver\6.5\bin\native\cadmin.exe).

By default, the checkpoints and index queue are left in place. This allows you to rebuild the local index on a node where the archive appears to be corrupted. You can add a flag to the command to remove the checkpoints.

To purge the search collection, but keep checkpoints: % cadmin purge As a safeguard against purging the collection by accident, you must confirm the action before the purge command is sent out.
The purge command causes a node to generate empty archive collections (document, spell, and mappings) and perform a soft-restart to load them into memory. Before reloading, the admin utility updates the checkpoint files in the shared repository to prevent the nodes from automatically reloading from an existing checkpoint.
To purge the search collection and delete existing checkpoints: % cadmin purge --remove-checkpoints

Sometimes the purge command does not work properly, where it fails to purge the index files. During this scenario the search file structure gets tainted and the Search Service will not start up.

If this occurs you receive an error similar to this:

Failed Unexpected exception while sending PURGE to searchserver01, Error during parsing: Failed -- purge failed on streetfighter01 This node should be shutdown, purged, and restarted manually.

At this point you will not be able to shut down, purge, or restart the Search Service. You must re-run the AquaLogic Integration installer. Select only the Search Service option and choose overwrite.

If you are purging the collection to correct a problem (for example if your collection was corrupted or you had to reinstall the Search Service), your next step is to rebuild the collection.

Parent topic: Purging and Rebuilding the Search Collection

AquaLogic Interaction Administrator Guide

Purging the Search Collection