Show HN: Java In-Memory search using Forage

[tusharnaik]

Greetings HN,

  I built Forage because I kept running into the same problem: I had a few tens of thousands of records in my main database, that needed full-text search, but standing up Elasticsearch felt like overkill. The alternatives were either clunky database LIKE queries or maintaining a sync pipeline to a dedicated search cluster.

  Forage is a Java library that builds a Lucene index directly in your application's memory. You pull data from your database, index it locally, and search with zero network hops.

  What it does:
  - Lucene power: fuzzy matching, phrase queries, boolean logic, range queries
  - Function scoring for custom ranking (field boosting, decay functions, scripts)
  - Cursor-based pagination
  - Stays in sync with your database through periodic bootstrapping
  - First-class Dropwizard integration

  When it makes sense:
  - Dataset fits in memory (up to ~1M documents)
  - You want microsecond search latency, not milliseconds
  - You don't want to operate search infrastructure when you have data in an existing relational / non-relational setup

  When it doesn't:
  - You need distributed search across nodes
  - Dataset exceeds heap memory
  - Real-time indexing of high-velocity streams