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
- Overcome common problems while analyzing your data
- Use the faceting mechanism to get aggregated information about your data
- Improve your Solr instance and Solr cluster performance
- Get to know how to configure and use SolrCloud
- Make use of the highlighting and document grouping functionalities
- Diagnose and resolve problems with Solr instances and clusters
- Implement different autocomplete functionalities
This book is for intermediate Solr Developers who are willing to learn and implement Pro-level practices, techniques, and solutions. This edition will specifically appeal to developers who wish to quickly get to grips with the changes and new features of Apache Solr 5.
2. Mastering Apache Solr 7.x
A product of three minds of Sandeep Nair, Chintan Mehta, and Dharmesh Vasoya, this is a practical guide in building expertise with Indexing, Faceting, Clustering and Pagination. The authors target developers, software engineers, data engineers and database architects who are building or seeking to build enterprise-wide effective search engines for business intelligence.
To begin with, you will be introduced to how you perform full-text search, multiple filter search, dynamic clustering and so on helping you to brush up on the basics of Apache Solr. You will explore the new features and advanced options released in Apache Solr 7.x which will get you numerous performance aspects and make data investigation simpler, easier and more powerful.
You will learn to build complex queries, and extensive filters and how are they compiled in your system to bring relevance in your search tools. You will learn to carry out Solr scoring, elements affecting the document score and how you can optimize or tune the score for the application at hand. You will learn to extract features of documents, and write complex queries in re-ranking the documents. That is just a sneak peek of the resource. Below are many more that you will be able to glean therein.
What you will learn
- Design schema using schema API to access data in the database
- Advance querying and fine-tuning techniques for better performance
- Get to grips with indexing using Client API
- Set up a fault-tolerant and highly available server with newer distributed capabilities, SolrCloud
- Explore Apache Tika to upload data with Solr Cell
- Understand different data operations that can be done while indexing
- Master advanced querying through Velocity Search UI, faceting and Query Re-ranking, pagination and spatial search
- Learn to use JavaScript, Python, SolrJ and Ruby to interact with Solr
If you have prior experience with Apache Solr or Java programming, then you are ready to take the best of this book. Deepen your Apache Solr expertise with this well-documented book. You can get it from Amazon below.
3. Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server
This book written by a combination of four authors is a comprehensive resource for just about everything Solr has to offer. It will take you from first exposure to development and deployment in no time. Even if you wish to use Solr 5, you should find the information to be just as applicable due to Solr’s high regard for backward compatibility. The book includes some useful information specific to Solr 5.
Apart from that, this book comes with complete running examples to demonstrate its use and show how to integrate Solr with other languages and frameworks including Hadoop. With more perspectives from authors who have worked with Solr for a long time, the following are more skills, expertise and knowledge that you will enjoy from Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server.
What You Will Take Home
- Design a schema to include text indexing details such as tokenization, stemming, and synonyms
- Import data from databases using various formats including CSV and XML and extract text from different document formats
- Search using Solr’s rich query syntax, perform geospatial searches, “join” relationally, and influence relevancy order
- Build a query auto-complete/suggester capability with knowledge of the fundamental types of suggestion and ways to implement them
- Enhance standard searches with faceting for navigation or analytics
- Deploy Solr to production taking into account logging, security, and monitoring
- Integrate a host of technologies with Solr including web crawlers, Hadoop, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Drupal, and others
- Tune Solr and use SolrCloud for horizontal scalability
For developers who want to learn how to get the most out of Solr in their applications, whether you are new to the field, have used Solr but don’t know everything, or simply want a good reference, this is the resource just for you. It would be helpful to have some familiarity with basic programming concepts, but no prior experience is required. So do not worry if you feel that this is not for you, grab it and begin your studies as soon as possible. You can have your copy delivered from Amazon below.
4. Solr in Action
Written by Trey Grainger, and Timothy Potter, Solr in Action is a comprehensive guide to implementing scalable search using Apache Solr. It will walk you through well-documented examples ranging from basic keyword searching to scaling a system for billions of documents and queries as well as give you a deep understanding of how to implement core Solr capabilities.
You will master topics like text analysis, faceted search, hit highlighting, result grouping, query suggestions, multilingual search, advanced geospatial and data operations, and relevancy tuning.
Promising Take Aways
- How to scale Solr for big data