Is it possible to just use Hibernate Search (Lucene) without also persisting the object model to a relational database?

I want what Hibernate Search gives me without the relational database overhead.

Thanks Lee

Hello,
yes there are some alternatives, Search is being reused as pluggable search engine in other systems than Hibernate Core.
Two alternatives:

* Infinispan Query
Uses Infinispan to store the Java objects, you annotate these objects with the same annotations of Hibernate Search and it will generate the same indexes and provide you the same query capabilities.
Please read more here: https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/I ... Infinispan

* Hibernate OGM
Hibernate OGM enables you to use a JPA interface - including Hibernate Search - on top of a NoSQL store. It's currently a young project and only two Alpha releases where published, but help is welcome. We presented a live demo using it which as pretty cool:
http://www.jboss.org/jbw2011keynote
I'd suggest reading more on my last blog post: http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/WhatYouD ... eynoteDemo

Currently OGM supports only Infinispan, so the two solutions are pretty similar unless you're interested in using the JPA interface.
Hope these pointers where useful, maybe if you could be more specific on how you plan to store your data I can give you some better hints.
Also you could have a look at how Infinispan Query embeds Hibernate Search: it's a pretty small codebase, just a bunch of adapting classes and configuration setup, I guess you could reuse the same approach to integrate Hibernate Search in anything else you might need.