As far as fulltext search goes, have you looked at Sphinx? http://www.sphinxsearch.com/ Plugs into MySQL and Drizzle, works really fast, and has awesome extras like stemming support.
Yeah, I've tried that and many other things. It's just yet another thing I have to worry about when I am making my app. I don't have to worry about TCP buffers or filesystems or RAM allocation. Similarly, I don't want to worry the backend that runs my app. I just want to use it.
I've been down the full text search path a few times; never fun, too many compromises and too much work. Just last week I used Sunspot solr http://github.com/outoftime/sunspot for a new site and wow, what a breath of fresh air. Its the first turnkey FTS I've found. Sunspot is a ruby lib built on solr's ruby lib. But it comes with solar embedded in the gem, scripts to startup/shutdown, complete config files...it just works!!! Add to that, my new app needed to do FTS for Chinese. I was expecting headaches and digging through Java XML hell...nope, it just worked.
Well, you can't have it both ways. You have to do that with MySQL or any other database server, if you're being your own sysadmin. If you really don't want to deal with it, then you need to hire someone to manage it or use something like Heroku.
