Presentation from my talk at the Minneapolis Apache Lucene/Solr meetup on Sep 23, 2014 hosted by and at Target.

2. Who am I?
• Anshum Gupta, Apache Lucene/Solr committer,
Lucidworks Employee.
• Search and related stuff for 9+ years.
• Apache Lucene since 2006 and Solr since 2010 but
consistent community involvement since 2012
• Organizations I am or have been a part of:

3. Apache Solr has a huge install base and tremendous momentum
Solr is both established & growing
250,000+
most widely used search
solution on the planet. 8M+ total downloads
monthly downloads
You use Solr everyday.
Solr has tens of thousands
of applications in production.
2500+ open Solr jobs.
Activity Summary
30 Day summary
Aug 18 - Sep 17 2014
• 128 Commits
• 18 Contributors
12 Month Summary
Sep 17, 2013 - Sep 17, 2014
• 1351 Commits
• 29 Contributors
via https://www.openhub.net/p/solr

4. Solr - Releases

5. Search - Until recently
• Large organizations (Enterprise)
• Expensive
• Complex
• $$$$$

6. “Easy is good”
–Someone

7. New Age Search
• Everyone… startups, websites
• Special use cases
• E-commerce
• Mails and personal data
• Personal data - Across devices
• Social and Local!
• Analytics

8. Decision making!
• Short time frame
• Confidence measure:
• Getting started quick
• Configure and see the tip of the iceberg
• Issues only uncover later in the story

9. Until recently…
• Getting started:
• Download
• java -jar start.jar
• SolrCloud, getting started….
• Download
• Copy example directory ‘x’ times over.
• java -Dbootstrap_confdir=./solr/collection1/conf -
Dcollection.configName=myconf -DzkRun -DnumShards=2 -jar start.jar
• java -Djetty.port=7574 -DzkHost=localhost:9983 -jar start.jar
• It runs!

10. Times… they are a changin…
• Download
• cd solr
• Standalone: bin/solr start
• SolrCloud, example, interactive:
• bin/solr start -e cloud (< 2 minutes!)

11. Let’s index some data…
• Auto Generation of Unique Key
• Solr accepts a single doc

12. Managed Schema
• Solr is the schema owner
• REST APIs - Hide the implementation details
• When you know what you got
• Or when you don’t! (Schema-less mode)
• Update and Addition of Fields and FieldTypes
More reading: https://lucidworks.com/blog/schemaless-solr-part-1/

13. Configuration APIs
• Configure Solr using APIs
• solrconfig.xml… What did you say?

14. Data Import Handler
• Rocket science no more!
• Make things work

15. Command Line Utils
• Ping and other tasks for already running instance.
• Works for *nix and Windows too!

16. Query DSL
q=*:*&rows=0&wt=json
&facet.field=cat&indent=true
&facet.pivot=cat,popularity,inStock
&facet.pivot=popularity,cat
&facet.pivot.mincount=2
&facet.limit=5&facet=true
{ “q” : ”*:*”,
“rows” : “0”,
“facet” : {
“” : “true”,
“pivot” : {
“” : [
“cat,popularity,inStock”,
“popularity,cat” ],
“mincount” : “2”
},
“field” : “cat”,
“limit” : “5”
}

17. Solr Scale Toolkit
• Easily deploy SolrCloud clusters
• Live patching and rolling restarts
• Dependency on AWS soon to go away
• Chef or Puppet still are valid approaches
More reading: http://lucidworks.com/blog/introducing-the-solr-scale-toolkit/

18. Talking about the Admin UI…
• Already improved from 3.x
• Uploading documents
• Collections API is coming soon
Collection Actions

19. There’s so much more…
• Self describing handlers
• Improved SolrJ API
• More support for other languages
• HDFS: Auto addition of replicas
• Cross Data-center replication
• SOLR - Make an application, not ‘war’.

20. It’s easy.. and stable!
• Benchmarking
• Tons of users testing it
• Evolving test framework

21. Solr scalability is unmatched.
• 10TB+ Index Size
• 10 Billion+ Documents
• 100 Million+ Daily Requests

22. Solr scalability is unmatched.

23. Where is it headed?
• Download
• See that server directory?
• Use start scripts
• Send a document, or a few…
• Things don’t really look the way they should?
• Use the schema APIs
• Add fields… not enough?
• Add field types and then add fields
• Configure Solr using REST APIs
For Production:
• Use Solr Scale Toolkit to deploy,
patch and manage!
• Configure Solr using REST APIs

24. Lucidworks Fusion
Intelligent Search Services/API
Recommendation Module Signal Processing Analytics Service
Enrichment Analytics Store
⚒ Services
Discovery Engine
Analyst
Workbench
eCommerce
Solution
Admin/
Management
SiLK Log
Analysis
Search/
Discovery
Partner
Solutions
Connector
Framework

25. Connect @
http://www.twitter.com/anshumgupta
http://www.linkedin.com/in/anshumgupta/
anshum.gupta@lucidworks.com