If you are a developer building an application today, then you know how important a good search experience is. Apache Solr, built on Apache Lucene, is a wildly popular open source enterprise search server that easily delivers the powerful search and faceted navigation features that are elusive with databases. Solr supports complex search criteria, faceting, result highlighting, query-completion, query spellcheck, relevancy tuning, and more.
Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server, Third Edition is a comprehensive resource to almost everything Solr has to offer. It serves the reader right from initiation to development to deployment. It also comes with complete running examples to demonstrate its use and show how to integrate Solr with other languages and frameworks—even Hadoop.
By using a large set of metadata, including artists, releases, and tracks, courtesy of the MusicBrainz.org project, you will have a testing ground for Solr and will learn how to import this data in various ways. You will then learn how to search this data in different ways, including Solr's rich query syntax and boosting match scores based on record data. Finally, we'll cover various deployment considerations to include indexing strategies and performance-oriented configuration that will enable you to scale Solr to meet the needs of a high-volume site.
Chapter 1, Quick Starting Solr, introduces Solr to you so that you understand its unique role in your application stack. You'll get started quickly by indexing example data and searching it with Solr's sample / browse UI. This chapter is oriented to Solr 5, but the majority of content applies to Solr 4 too.
Chapter 2, Schema Design, guides you through an approach to modeling your data within Solr into one or more Solr indices and schemas. It covers the schema thoroughly and explores some of Solr's field types.
Chapter 3, Text Analysis, covers how to customize text tokenization, stemming, synonyms, and related matters to have fine control over keyword search matching. It also covers multilingual strategies.
Chapter 4, Indexing Data, explores all of the options Solr offers for importing data, such as XML, CSV, databases (SQL), and text extraction from common documents. This includes important information on commits, atomic updates, and real-time search.
Chapter 5, Searching, covers the query syntax, from the basics to Boolean options to more advanced wildcard and fuzzy searches, join queries, and geospatial search.
Chapter 6, Search Relevancy, explains how Solr scores documents for relevancy ranking. We'll review different options to influence the score, called boosting, and apply it to common examples such as boosting recent documents and boosting by a user vote.
Chapter 7, Faceting, shows you how to use Solr's killer feature—faceting. You'll learn about the different types of facets and how to build filter queries for a faceted navigation interface.
Chapter 8, Search Components, explores how to use a variety of valuable search features implemented as Solr search components. This includes result highlighting, query spellcheck, query suggest / complete, result grouping / collapsing, and more.
Chapter 9, Integrating Solr, explores some external integration options to interface with Solr. This includes some language-specific frameworks for Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP, as well as a web crawler, Hadoop, a quick prototyping option, and more.
Chapter 10, Scaling Solr, covers how to tune Solr to get the most out of it. Then we'll introduce how to scale beyond one instance with SolrCloud.
Chapter 11, Deployment, guides you through deployment considerations to include deploying Solr to Apache Tomcat, to logging, and to security, and setting up Apache ZooKeeper.
Appendix, Quick Reference, serves as a small parameter quick-reference guide you can print to have within reach when you need it.
The Getting started section in Chapter 1, Quick Starting Solr, explains what you need in detail. In summary, you should obtain:
Java 8, a JDK release. Java 7 is fine too. Support for Java 6 was last available in Solr 4.7. More information on this is in Chapter 1, Quick Starting Solr.
Apache Solr 4.8.1 is officially the version of Solr this book was written for. Nonetheless, some of the features are discussed or referenced in the later versions of Solr as far as 5.0. In fact, Chapter 1, Quick Starting Solr, orients you to Solr 5, which has a different first-impression experience than its predecessor. Once you get Solr running, you should be able to follow along easily with Solr 5. In Chapter 10, Scaling Solr, there are some SolrCloud startup commands that are a little different, and we've pointed out how they change. The only substantial topic not covered in this book that evolved through the Solr 4 point releases is data-driven schemaless mode, and HTTP API calls to make schema changes.
The code supplement to the book. It's not essential, but you'll want it to try some of the examples or to experiment with a sizable amount of real data. See the Downloading the example code section.
This book is primarily for developers who want to learn how to use Apache Solr in their applications. Only basic programming skills are assumed, although the vast majority of content should be useful to those with a solid technical foundation that have not yet programmed.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Typing java –version at a command line will tell you exactly which version of Java you are using, if any."
A block of code is set as follows:
"responseHeader": {
"status": 0,
"QTime": 1,
"params": {
"q": "lcd",
"indent": "true",
"wt": "json"
}
}
…When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
{
"id": "9885A004",
"name": "Canon PowerShot SD500",
"manu": "Canon Inc.",
"manu_id_s": "canon",
"cat": [
"electronics",
"camera"
],
"features": [
"3x zoop, 7.1 megapixel Digital ELPH",
"movie clips up to 640x480 @30 fps",
"2.0\" TFT LCD, 118,000 pixels",
"built in flash, red-eye reduction"
],
"includes": "32MB SD card, USB cable, AV cable, battery",
"weight": 6.4,
"price": 329.95,
"price_c": "329.95,USD",
"popularity": 7,
"inStock": true,
"manufacturedate_dt": "2006-02-13T15:26:37Z",
"store": "45.19614,-93.90341",
"_version_": 1500358264225792000
},
...Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
>> cd example/exampledocs >> java –Dc=techproducts -jar post.jar *.xml SimplePostTool version 5.0.0 Posting files to [base] url http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/ update using content-type application/xml... POSTing file gb18030-example.xml POSTing file hd.xml etc. 14 files indexed. COMMITting Solr index changes to http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/update...
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Core Selector drop-down menu and select the techproducts link."
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A copy of the code bundle and possibly other information will also be available at http://www.solrenterprisesearchserver.com.
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