Solr architecture diagram

4 CommentsTechnology, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We at Cominvent have often had the need to visualize the internal architecture of Apache Solr in order to explain both the relationships of the components as well as the flow of data and queries. The result is this conceptual architecture diagram, clearly showing how Solr relates to the app-server, how cores relate to a

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Apache Solr 3.1 released

Search technology, Solr, Technology, , , , , , ,

It’s been a long wait, and now it’s here – the release of Solr version 3.1. The 1.4.1 release was in June 2010, and for various reasons there was never a 1.4.2 nor a 1.5 release. Part of the reason is the merge of Lucene and Solr codebase which is also why the version number is 3.1 instead of 1.5.

So what’s new? For me, the single most important features are the Extended Dismax parser (SOLR-1553) and Geospatial search. The full list of improvements is found in CHANGES.TXT, but here are my favorites:

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The Solr distros are coming

2 CommentsOpen Source, Search technology, Solr distros, Technology, Trends, , , , , , ,

Open Source Search is gaining more and more traction. First you had Lucene (2001), giving great search for programmers. Then we got Solr (2006) making search accessible for non programmers, but a certain level of expertise is still needed. And then came Constellio, an open source (GPL) enterprise search distribution (distro) built on Solr, adding a slick GUI, connector and crawling support and more.

Say again. A Solr distro?

I call it “distro” because I like to compare the evolution to what we have seen in GNU/Linux. First there was the Linux core. Then there was the GNU tools that made Linux so much more usable but still only for engineers comfortable with the command line. And last, companies like RedHat and Suse built complete distros including modern GUI, ready-to use tools such as OpenOffice, Thunderbird and more. Without these distros, Linux would just have been a “core” leaving to the user to add the extra sugar.

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The first real FAST Search book

1 CommentFAST ESP, Search technology, Technology, , , , , ,

Book cover © Amazon & Wrox

Over due by several years, Wrox just published a book about Microsoft Enterprise Search, including the different FAST flavours. Bravo!

You can ask how all the users of FAST technology could have managed for so many years without some public source of learning the products. Up until now FAST/MS and their partners have been the sole source of learning FAST Search [1]. Now, we’re part of that eco-system and may have profited on the lack of material available, but that’s another story.

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