Text search has been around for perhaps longer than we all can remember. Just about all systems, from client installed software to web sites to the web itself, have search. Yet there is a big difference between the best search experiences and the mediocre, unmemorable ones. If you want the application you're building to stand out above the rest, then it's got to have great search features. If you leave this to the capabilities of a database, then it's near impossible that you're going to get a great search experience, because it's not going to have features that users come to expect in a great search. With Solr, the leading open source search server, you'll tap into a host of features from highlighting search results to spell-checking to faceting.
As you read Solr Enterprise Search Server you'll be guided through all of the aspects of Solr, from the initial download to eventual deployment and performance optimization. Nearly all the options of Solr are listed and described here, thus making this book a resource to turn to as you implement your Solr based solution. The book contains code examples in several programming languages that explore various integration options, such as implementing query auto-complete in a web browser and integrating a web crawler. You'll find these working examples in the online supplement to the book along with a large, real-world, openly available data set from MusicBrainz.org. Furthermore, you will also find instructions on accessing a Solr image readily deployed from within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.
Solr Enterprise Search Server targets the Solr 1.4 version. However, as this book went to print prior to Solr 1.4's release, two features were not incorporated into the book: search result clustering and trie-range numeric fields.
Chapter 1, Quick Starting Solr introduces Solr to the reader as a middle ground between database technology and document/web crawlers. The reader is guided through the Solr distribution including running the sample configuration with sample data.
Chapter 2, The Schema and Text Analysis is all about Solr's schema. The schema design is an important first order of business along with the related text analysis configuration.
Chapter 3, Indexing Data details several methods to import data; most of them can be used to bring the MusicBrainz data set into the index. A popular Solr extension called the DataImportHandler is demonstrated too.
Chapter 4, Basic Searching is a thorough reference to Solr's query syntax from the basics to range queries. Factors influencing Solr's scoring algorithm are explained here, as well as diagnostic output essential to understanding how the query worked and how a score is computed.
Chapter 5, Enhanced Searching moves on to more querying topics. Various score boosting methods are explained from those based on record-level data to those that match particular fields or those that contain certain words. Next, faceting is a major subject area of this chapter. Finally, the term auto-complete is demonstrated, which is implemented by the faceting mechanism.
Chapter 6, Search Components covers a variety of searching extras in the form of Solr "components", namely, spell-check suggestions, highlighting search results, computing statistics of numeric fields, editorial alterations to specific user queries, and finding other records "more like this".
Chapter 7, Deployment transits from running Solr from a developer-centric perspective to deploying and running Solr as a deployed production enterprise service that is secure, has robust logging, and can be managed by System Administrators.
Chapter 8, Integrating Solr surveys a plethora of integration options for Solr, from supported client libraries in Java, JavaScript, and Ruby, to being able to consume Solr results in XML, JSON, and even PHP syntaxes. We'll look at some best practices and approaches for integrating Solr into your web application.
Chapter 9, Scaling Solr looks at how to scale Solr up and out to avoid meltdown and meet performance expectations. This information varies from small changes of configuration files to architectural options.
This book is for developers who would like to use Solr to implement a search capability for their applications. You need only to have basic programming skills to use Solr; extending or modifying Solr itself requires Java programming. Knowledge of Lucene, the foundation of Solr, is certainly a bonus.
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 are shown as follows: "These are essentially defaults for searches that are processed by Solr request handlers defined in solrconfig.xml."
A block of code is set as follows:
<uniqueKey>id</uniqueKey> <!-- <defaultSearchField>text</defaultSearchField> <solrQueryParser defaultOperator="AND"/> --> <copyField source="r_name" dest="r_name_sort" />
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<arr name="id">
<str>mccm.pdf</str>
</arr>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
>> curl http://localhost:8983/solr/karaoke/update/ -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --data-binary '<commit waitFlush="false"/>'
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: "Take for example the Top Voters section ".
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