What Oracle ATG Web Commerce products do you plan to use along with Search? It’s a good idea to review all of the applicable documentation before beginning any installation.

Do you plan to use multisite? This decision does not affect your Search installation, but may affect other aspects of your installation planning. See the ATG Multisite Administration Guide for information on multisite planning.

How will you apportion your hardware? Indexing and searching are resource-intensive functions that benefit strongly from dedicated hardware with robust specifications.

How will your applications be distributed? Some applications can share an Oracle ATG Web Commerce server instance, while others cannot. Will your system include clusters? See the ATG Multiple Application Integration Guide for architectural information.

How will administrative functions such as lock management be handled? With a dedicated Oracle ATG Web Commerce server instance, or as part of some other function?

What database software will you use? Where will the Oracle ATG Web Commerce platform and application schemas be located? How will they be accessed?

Where will your Search deployment share be located? The deployment share is a single, scalable, shared directory where master copies of indexes are stored. Your installation can have only one deployment share, which should be located on a dedicated high-performance disk, separate from the Search Administration installation. The Search Administration installation and all search engines must have access to this directory.

Note: The size of the index that is deployed does not bear any direct relationship to the size of the raw information being indexed—dictionaries, topics, and other customization data can all add to the size of the index, as can the nature of the content itself. For example, content consisting mostly of pictures with some metadata might form a very small index relative to the raw content size, while a product catalog with many small, unique pieces of information might be relatively large.