Solr is the popular, blazing-fast, open source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene. In case you have lots of data you would wish to index, search as fast as possible, secure, monitor, scale name it. The Apache Solr is what you should be looking for.
As it has been lightly touched on, Solr is fault tolerant, scalable, highly reliable software that provides distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying. Apart from that you also get automated failover and recovery, a central place for your configuration among many other features we shall peep at in a jiffy. It is the silent giant that is used in many of the world’s largest internet sites powering their search and navigation features.
Features of Apache Solr
Apache Solr has its own respects where it is employed in various use cases due to the following prominent features that make it amazing:
- Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities
Powered by Lucene™, Solr enables powerful matching capabilities including phrases, wildcards, joins, grouping and much more across any data type - Optimized for High Volume Traffic
Solr is proven at extremely large scales the world over - Standards Based Open Interfaces – XML, JSON and HTTP
Solr uses the tools you use to make application building a snap - Comprehensive Administration Interfaces
Solr ships with a built-in, responsive administrative user interface to make it easy to control your Solr instances - Easy Monitoring
Need more insight into your instances? Solr publishes loads of metric data via JMX - Extensible Plugin Architecture
Solr publishes many well-defined extension points that make it easy to plugin both index and query time plugins. - Near Real-Time Indexing
Want to see your updates now? Solr takes advantage of Lucene’s Near Real-Time Indexing capabilities to make sure you see your content when you want to see it - Highly Scalable and Fault Tolerant
Built on the battle-tested Apache Zookeeper, Solr makes it easy to scale up and down. Solr bakes in replication, distribution, rebalancing and fault tolerance out of the box. - Security built right in
Secure Solr with SSL, Authentication and Role based Authorization. Pluggable, of course! - Monitorable Logging
Easily access Solr’s log files from the admin interface - Multiple search indices
Solr supports multi-tenant architectures, making it easy to isolate users and content. - And much much more you are about to discover.
Without taking much time, let us look at some of the resources in form of books that you can rely on to learn, grasp and start your Solr journey. They include the following:
1. Solr Cookbook – Third Edition
Author Rafal Kuc divided this book into ten chapters covering important topics such as “Solr configuration”, “performance optimization” or “SolrCloud“. Starting with vital information on setting up Solr, you will quickly progress to analyzing your text data through querying and performance improvement.
With the help of intermediate and advanced recipes, you will learn how to index data and query Solr. Then, you will deep dive into faceting and learn how to improve Solr’s performance. You will also work with SolrCloud clusters and will get to grips with the advanced functionalities of Solr. Finally, you will explore real-life situations, where Solr can be used to simplify daily collection handling. By the end of this book, you will be able to produce enhanced, optimized, and powerful results by implementing pro-level practices and techniques.
What You Will Learn
- Acquire the skills needed to index your data in different formats, forms, and sources