Create a Solr Index using Lucene IndexWriter - solr

I need to index vast amounts of content in extremely short order, I have tried various techniques using Solrnet/solr using threading and TPL, however the speeds leave a lot to be desired. Hence considering a move to using Lucene.net index writer to create an index (preliminarily I see almost an order of magnitude of speed improvement) . Any "gotchas" to be aware of?
I am not too sure if:
1. Trie based Numeric Range query would continue to be available for query via Solr. ( I am using NumericFields in Lucene)?
2. Faceting etc. would continue to be available ?
Anything else I need to watch out for?

Please see Scaling Lucene and Solr about improving run times.
If you decide to go with Lucene:
You need a unique id field for the index to be a valid Solr index.
The schema must match the Solr schema.
The Lucene version must be the same as in Solr.
I think the range query and faceting will be available, as long as you index the respective fields according to the requirements in Solr, and use the same analyzers.

Related

Solr queries stored within Solr field

I have a set of keywords defined by client requirements stored in a SOLR field. I also have a never ending stream of sentences entering the system.
By using the sentence as the query against the keywords I am able to find those sentences that match the keywords. This is working well and I am pleased. What I have essentially done is reverse the way in which SOLR is normally used by storing the query in Solr and passing the text in as the query.
Now I would like to be able to extend the idea of having just a keyword in a field to having a more fully formed SOLR query in a field. Doing so would allow proximity searching etc. But, of course, this is where life becomes awkward. Placing SOLR query operators into a field will not work as they need to be escaped.
Does anyone know if it might be possible to use the SOLR "query" function or perhaps write a java class that would enable such functionality? Or is the idea blowing just a bit too much against the SOLR winds?
Thanks in advance.
ES has percolate for this - for Solr you'll usually index the document as a single document in a memory based core / index and then run the queries against that (which is what ES at least used to do internally, IIRC).
I would check out the percolate api with ElasticSearch. It would sure be easier using this api than having to write your own in Solr.

lucene Fields vs. DocValues

I'm using and playing with Lucene to index our data and I've come across some strange behaviors concerning DocValues Fields.
So, Could anyone please just explain the difference between a regular Document field (like StringField, TextField, IntField etc.) and DocValues fields
(like IntDocValuesField, SortedDocValuesField (the types seem to have change in Lucene 5.0) etc.) ?
First, why can't I access DocValues using document.get(fieldname)? if so, how can I access them?
Second, I've seen that in Lucene 5.0 some features are changed, for example sorting can only be done on DocValues... why is that?
Third, DocValues can be updated but regular fields cannot (you have to delete and add the whole document)...
Also, and perhaps most important, when should I use DocValues and when regular fields?
Joseph
Most of these questions are quickly answered by either referring to the Solr Wiki or to a web search, but to get the gist of DocValues: they're useful for all the other stuff associated with a modern Search service except for the actual searching. From the Solr Community Wiki:
DocValues are a way of recording field values internally that is more efficient for some purposes, such as sorting and faceting, than traditional indexing.
...
DocValue fields are now column-oriented fields with a document-to-value mapping built at index time. This approach promises to relieve some of the memory requirements of the fieldCache and make lookups for faceting, sorting, and grouping much faster.
This should also answer why Lucene 5 requires DocValues for sorting - it's a lot more efficient than the previous approach.
The reason for this is that the storage format is turned around from the standard format when gathering data for these operations, where the application previously have to go through each document to find the values, it can now look up the values and find the corresponding documents instead. Which is very useful when you already have a list of documents that you need to perform an intersection on.
If I remember correctly, updating a DocValue-based field involves yanking the document out from the previous token list, and then re-inserting it into the new location, compared to the previous approach where it would change loads of dependencies (and reindexing was the only viable strategy).
Use DocValues for fields that need any of the properties mentioned above, such as sorting / faceting / etc.

Lucene and SQL Server - best practice

I am pretty new to Lucene, so would like to get some help from you guys :)
BACKGROUND: Currently I have documents stored in SQL Server and want to use Lucene for full-text/tag searches on those documents in SQL Server.
Q1) In this case, in order to do the keyword search on the documents, should I insert all of those documents to the Lucene index? Does this mean there will be data duplication (one in SQL Server and the other one in the Lucene index?) It could be a matter since we have a massive amount of documents (about 100GB). Is it inevitable?
Q2) Also, each documents has a set of tags (up to 3). Lucene is also good choice for the tag search? If so, how to do it?
Thanks,
Yes, providing full-text search through Lucene and data storage through a traditional database is a well-supported architecture. Take a look here, for a brief introduction. A typical implementation would be to index anything you wish to be able to support searching on, and store only a unique identifier in the Lucene index, and pull any records founds by a search from the database, based on the ID. If you want to reduce DB load, you can store some information in Lucene to display a list of search results, and only query the database in order to fetch the full document.
As for saving on space, there will be some measure of duplication. This is true even if you only Lucene, though. Lucene stores the inverted index used for searching entirely separately from stored data. For saving on space, I'd recommend being very deliberate about what data you choose to index, and what you need to store and be able to retrieve later. What you store is particularly important for saving space in Lucene, since indexed-only values tend to be very space-efficient, in most cases.
Lucene can certainly implement a tag search. The simple way to implement it would be to add each tag to a field of your choosing (I'll call is "tags", which seems to make sense), while building the document, such as:
document.add(new Field("tags", "widget", Field.Store.NO, Field.Index.ANALYZED));
document.add(new Field("tags", "forkids", Field.Store.NO, Field.Index.ANALYZED));
and I could simply add a required term to any query to search only within a particular tag. For instance, if I was to search for "some stuff", but only with the tag "forkids", I could write a query like:
some stuff +tags:forkids
Documents can also be stored in Lucene, you can retrieve and reference them using the document ID.
I would suggest using Solr http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ on top of Lucene, is more user friendly and has multiValued fields (for the tags) available by default.
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SchemaXml

Geoclusters in SOLR

We're reimplementing a search that includes locations that need to be clustered on a map. I've been searching without luck for an implementation in SOLR.
The current search with map clustering implemented is at http://www.uship.com/find
Has anyone seen similar or have ideas about how to best do this?
Regards,
Nick
If the requirement is to cluster a fairly small number of points, perhaps less than 1000, then Solr needn't be involved. Grab the points and plot them using something like HeatmapJS.
I presume the requirement is to cluster all results in a search which may potentially be many thousands or even millions of documents. I suggest starting with generating a heatmap of the densities over a grid of the search area. You can do this by indexing each point encoded in geohash form at each length (e.g. D2RY, D2R, D2, D). But then precede the length by how long it is: 4_D2RY, 3_D2R, 2_D2, 1_D. These little strings go into a multi-valued "string" type field in Solr that you will then facet on. When faceting, you'll come up with a suitable grid resolution (e.g. goehash prefix length) and then use that as a prefix query, like facet.prefix=4_ You can index the point using a LatLonType field separately and do a standard bounding box query there. At this point, you're faceted search results will give you the information to fill in a grid of numbers. The beauty of this scheme is that it is fast -- you could generate such heat-maps on the fly. It will use a fair amount of RAM though since this is faceting on a multi-valued field that will have a ton of values. This is something I want to add to the new Lucene spatial module (or perhaps at the Solr layer) in a way that won't need extra memory and to make it easy. It won't make it to Solr 4.0, but maybe 4.1.
At this stage, perhaps a heatmap is fine as-is. But you may want to apply clustering on top of this, as your question states. Someone tipped me off to some interesting geo clustering algorithms that can be applied to heatmaps.
I don't know whether you searched lucidworks, but there are many interesting resources there:
Search with Polygons: Another Approach to Solr Geospatial Search
Go through these:
http://www.lucidimagination.com/search/?q=geospatial#%2Fn
Already implemented in Solr:
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SpatialSearch/ (what's wrong with this approach?)
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SpatialSearchDev
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-3304

Lucene - few or a lot of indexes

Is it better to use
a lot of indexes (eg. for every user as your application allows that)
in Lucene
or just one, having every document in int
... if you think about:
performance
disk space
health
I am using elasticsearch, therefore I am using Lucene.
In Elastic Search, I think based off your information I would use 1 index. My understanding is users are only searching there own documents, and the documents seems to be relatively similar.
Performance - When searching you can use a Filtered Query to filter to only the documents matching the user. The user id filter is cache-able, and fast.
Scalable - In Elasticsearch, you control sharding and replication at index level. Elasticsearch can handle large numbers of indexes, I just think configuring appropriate shards and replications could be valuable for the entire index.
In a single index, you can still easy wipe away data (see delete by query) , and there should be little concern of seeing others data unless you write your queries wrong. A filtered query with that filters results to only those associated with a user id is very simple. Similar in complexity to searching a different index per user.
Your exact needs might fit a different approach better. Based what I have so far, I would do choose one index though.

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