Spatial Search Objectify, appengine - google-app-engine

I want to use, objectify for spatial search. I have entities that have longitude and latitude associated with them. Latitude and longitude information is dynamic e.g. service providers (like electrician, carpenter) in a city. I want to implement a query that gives me service providers providing some specific service in 1 Km radius. Searching on google reveals following options
Use Objectify with geohashes - Not sure, how accurate and scalable this solution is
Use Google Search - It will need entities(or part of it) duplicated in the form of documents and Will it be able to support dynamically updated locations.
Use other database like mongodb
Assuming few millions entities and latitude/longitude dynamically updated, please suggest me an appropriate option.
thanks
Ittium

I've used geohashes. It works, although you end up selecting more data than the exact bounds you are looking for and then filtering out the extra. This might or might not be a good solution depending on your specific application. It requires writing more code but has fewer moving parts (all in the datastore).
Google search and "other database" are basically the same architectural pattern - use the task queue to replicate updates to an external index. If you want a quick solution, the search service is probably is the easiest to wrap your head around.
Just pick one solution and run with it for a while. You can always reindex the data into a different solution.

It really depends on your query rate but I usually prefer to use google search. Building and maintaining docs is pretty simple and you get a different quota to handle this queries.

Related

Advice for implementing a user-search from with React UI and Spring Boot server

I have a Spring Boot/React application. I have a list of users in my database I will have populated already from LDAP.
As part of a form, I need to allow users to specify a list of users. Since they could be searching from (and technically specifying as well), up to 400,000 users (most will be in the 10k or less range), I'm assuming I'd need to do this both client and server-side.
Does anyone have any recommendations on the approach or technologies?
I'm not using a small amount of data, but I don't want to over-engineer it either (tips are mostly for server-side, but any are welcome).
If you are using hibernate as the ORM in your application, you may also checkout Hibernate Search. This seems to serve your purpose as I feel that searching through a list of users can be done using a normal text based index. Hibernate search leverages Lucene, which is suitable for text based indexing and searching.
While another answer is good and works perfectly fine when you have a small set of data but be aware of the few design issue with it.
Lucene is not distributed and you can't easily scale it to multiple horizontal machines without duplicating the whole index, which is perfectly fine when you have a small set of data and in-fact it's pretty fast as there will be no network call(in case of elasticsearch, it will be).
If you want to build a stateless application that is easy to HS(horizontally scalablele) then going with Lucene will not be helpful as it stateful and you need to create Lucene index before your newly spawned app-server finished local indexing in Lucene.
Elasticsearch(ES) is rest-based and is written in JAVA and has very good java-client which you can easily use for simple to complex use-cases.
Last but not the least, please go through the STOF answer of none other than shay banon, creator of Elasticsearch, who explains why he created ES in first place :) and which will give more trade-off and insights to choose a best solution for your use-case.

What's the Best Way to Query Multiple REST API's and Deliver Relevant Search Results?

My organization has multiple databases that we need to provide search results for. Right now you have to search each database individually. I'm trying to create a web interface that will query all the databases at once and sort the results based upon relevance.
Some of the databases I have direct access to. Others I can only access via a REST API.
My challenge isn't knowing how to query each individual database. I understand how to make API calls. It's how to sort the results by relevance.
On the surface it looks like Elasticsearch would be a good option. Its reverse indexing system seems like a good solution to figuring out which results are going to be the most relevant to our users. It's also super fast.
The problem is that I don't see a way (so far) to include results from an external API into Elasticsearch so it can do its magic.
Is there a better option that I'm not aware of? Or is it possible to have Elasticsearch evaluate the relevance of results from an external API while also including data from its own internal indices?
I did find an answer, although nobody replied. :\
The answer is to use the http_poll plugin with logstash. This will make an API call and injest the results into Elasticsearch.
Another option could be some form of microservices orchestration for the various API calls then merge them into a final result set.

Are there any nosql database could do search(like lucene) on map/reduce

I'm using cloudant which I could use mapreduce to project view of data and also it could search document with lucene
But these 2 feature is separate and cannot be used together
Suppose I make a game with userdata like this
{
name: ""
items:[]
}
Each user has item. Then I want to let user find all swords with quality +10. With cloudant I might project type and quality as key and use query key=["sword",10]
But it cannot make query more complex than that like lucene could do. To do lucene I need to normalize all items to be document and reference it with owner
I really wish I could do a lucene search on a key of data projection. I mean, instead of normalization, I could store nested document as I want and use map/reduce to project data inside document so I could search for items directly
PS. If that database has partial update by scripting and inherently has transaction update feature that would be the best
I'd suggest trying out elasticsearch.
Seems like your use case should be covered by the search api
If you need to do more complex analytics elasticsearch supports aggregations.
I am not at all sure that I got the question correctly, but you may want to take a look at riak. It offers a solr-based search, which is quite well documented. I have used it in the past for distributed search over a distributed key-value index and it was quite fast.
If you use this, you will also need to take a look at the syntax of solr queries, so I add it here to save you some time. However, keep in mind that not all of those solr query functionalities were available in riak (at least that was when I used it).
There are several solutions that would do the job. I can give my 2 cents proposing the well established MongoDB. With MongoDB you can create a text-Index on a given field and then do a full text Search as explained here. The feature is in MongoDb since version 2.4 and the syntax is well documented on MongoDB docs.

Storing 100k map markers in App Engine

I'm designing yet another "Find Objects near my location" web site and mobile app.
My requirements are:
Store up to 100k objects;
Query for objects that are close to the point (my location, city, etc). And other search criteria (like object type);
Display results on the Google Maps with smooth performance.
Let user filter objects by object time.
I'm thinking about using Google App Engine for this project.
Could You recommend what would be the best data storage option for this?
And couple of words about dynamic data loading strategy.
I kinda feel overwhelmed with options at the moment and looking for hints where should I continue my research.
Thanks a lot!
I'm going to to assume that you are using the datastore. I'm not familiar with Google Cloud SQL (which I believe aims to offer MySQL-like features in the cloud), so I can't speak if it can do geospatial queries.
I've been looking into the whole "get locations in proximity of a location" problem for a while now. I have some good and bad news for you, unfortunately.
The best way to do the proximity search in the Google Environment is via the Search Service (https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/ or find the JAVA link ). Reason being is that it supports a "Geopoint Field", and allows you to query in such a way.
Ok, cool, so there is support, right? However, "A query is complex if its query string includes the name of a geopoint field or at least one OR or NOT boolean operator". The free quota for Complex Search Queries are 100/day. Per 10,000 queries, it costs 60 cents. Depending on your application, this may be an issue.
I'm not too familar with the Google Maps API you might be able to pull off something like this :(https://developers.google.com/maps/articles/phpsqlsearch_v3)
My current project/problem involves moving locations, and not "static" ones (stores, landmarks,etc). I've decided to go with Amazon's Dynamodb and they have a library which supports geospatial indexing : http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/09/05/announcing-amazon-dynamodb-geospatial-indexing/

How can I relate search indexes to models in MVC?

I have an MVC application which I need to be able to search. The application is modular so it needs to be easy for modules to register data to index with the search module.
At present, there's just a quick interim solution in place which is fine for flexibility, but speed was always going to be a problem. Modules register models (and relationships and columns) which they'd like to be searchable. Upon search, the search functionality queries data using those relationships and applies Levenshtein, removes stop words, does character replacements etc. Clearly this will slow down as the volume of data increases so it's not viable to keep as it is effectively select * from x,y,z and then mine through the data.
The benefit of the above is such that there is a direct relation to the model which found the data. For example, if Model_Product finds something, I know that in my code i can use Model_Product::url() to associate the result off to the relevant location or Model_Product::find(other data) to show say the image or description if the keyword had been found in the title for example.
Another benefit of the above is it's already database specific, and therefore can just be thrown up onto a virtualhost and it works.
I have read about the various options, and they all seem very similar so it's unlikely that people are going to be able to suggest the 'right' one without inciting discussion or debate, but for the record; from the following options, Solr seems to be the one I'm leaning toward. I'm not set in stone so if anyone has any advice they'd like to share or other options I could look at, that'd be great.
Sphinx
Lucene
Solr - appears to just run Lucene as a service?
Xapian
ElasticSearch
Looking through various tutorials and guides they all seem relatively easy to set up and configure. In the case above I can have modules register the path of config files/search index models and have the searcher run them all through search program x. This will build my indexes, and provide the means by which to query data. Fine.
What I don't understand is how any of these indexes related to my other code. If I index data, search and in turn find a result with say Solr, how do I know how to get all of the other information related to the bit it found?
Also is someone able to confirm whether or not I will need to have an instance of any of the above per virtualhost? This is something which I can't seem to find much information on. I would assume that I can just connect to a single instance and tell it what data is relevant? Much like connecting to a single DBMS server, with credentials x to database y.
Granted I haven't done as extensive reading on this as I would have typically because I'm a bit stuck in terms of direction at the moment and I'd rather not read everything about everything in favour of seeking some advice from those who know before I take a particular route.
Edit: This question seems to have swayed me more towards Solr. There's also a similar thread here with a fair amount of insight into Sphinx.
DISCLAIMER: I can only speak about Lucene/Solr and, I believe, ElasticSearch as I know it is based on Lucene. Others might or might not work in the same way.
If I index data, search and in turn find a result with say Solr, how
do I know how to get all of the other information related to the bit
it found?
You can store any extra data you want, e.g. a database key pointing to a particular row in the database. Lucene/Solr can also help you to find relative information, e.g. if you run a DVD rent shop and user has misspelled a movie name, Lucene will figure this out for you and (unlike with DB) still list the closest alternatives. You can also provide hints by boosting certain fields during indexing or querying. There are special extensions for geospatial search, etc. And obviously you can provide your own if you need to.
Also is someone able to confirm whether or not I will need to have an
instance of any of the above per virtualhost?
Lucene is a low level library and will have to be present in every JVM you run. Solr (built on top of Lucene) is an HTTP server. You can call it from as many clients as you want. More scaling options explained here.

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