We started with a brief introduction to BioSolr from Dr. Sameer Velankar and Flax then talked on Best Practices for Indexing with Solr. Based very much on our own experience and projects, we showed how although Solr’s Data Import Handler can be used to carry out many of the various tasks necessary to import, convert and process data, we prefer to write our own indexing systems, allowing us to more easily debug complex indexing tasks and protect the system from less stable external processing libraries. We then moved on to a presentation on Distributed Indexing, describing the older master/slaves technique and the more modern SolrCloud architecture we’ve used for several recent projects. We finished the morning’s talks with a quick guide to how to migrate from Apache Lucene to Apache Solr (which of course uses Lucene under the hood but is a much easier and full featured system to work with).

After lunch and some networking, we gave a further short presentation on comparing Elasticsearch to Solr, as some teams at the EBI have been considering its use. We then heard from Giovanni on Siren Solutions‘ innovative method for indexing heirarchical data with Solr using XML. His talk mentioned how by encoding tree positions directly within the index, far fewer Solr documents need to be created, with an index size reduction of 50% and up to twice the query speed. Siren have recently released open source plugins for both Solr and Elasticsearch based on this idea which are certainly worth investigating.

Following this talk, Lewis Geer described how the NCBI have built a large scale bioinformatics search platform backed both by Solr, built on commodity hardware and supporting up to 500 queries per second. To enable queries using various methods (Solr, SQL or even BLAST) they have built their own internal query language, standard result schemas and also collaborated with Heliosearch to develop improved JOIN facilities for Solr. The latter is a very exciting development as JOINs are heavily used in bioinformatics queries and we believe these features (made available recently as Solr patches) can be of use to the EBI as well. We’ll be investigating further how we can both use these features and help them to be committed to Solr.

Next were a collection of short talks from various teams from the Wellcome campus on how they were using Solr, Lucene and related tools. We heard from the PDBE, SPOT, Ensembl, UniProt, Sanger Core Services and Literature Services on a varied range of use cases, from searching proteins using Solr to scientific papers using Lucene. It was clear that we’ve still only scratched the surface of what is being done with both Lucene and Solr, and as the project progresses we hope to be able to generate repositories of useful software, documentation, best practises, guidance on migration and scaling and also learn a huge amount more about how search can be used in bioinformatics.

Over the next few weeks members of the Flax team will be visiting the EBI to work directly with the PDB and SPOT teams, to find out where we might be most effective. We’ll also be running Solr user group meetings at both the EBI and in Cambridge, of which more details soon. Do let us know if you’re interested! Thanks to the EBI for hosting the workshop day and of course the BBSRC for funding the BioSolr project.

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Adding some closed-source dusting to a popular open-source distribution is nothing new of course – many companies do it, especially those that are venture funded – it’s a way of building intellectual property while also taking full advantage of the open-source model in terms of user adoption. Other strategies include curated distributions such as that offered by Heliosearch, founded by Solr creator Yonik Seeley and our partner LucidWorks‘ complete packaged search applications. It can help lock potential clients into your version of the software and your vision of the future, although of course they are still free to download the core and go it alone (or engage people like us to help do so), which helps them retain some control.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this strategy develops for Elasticsearch (for the last time, the company). At Flax we’ve also built various additional software components for search applications – but as we have no external investors to please these are freely available as open-source software, including Luwak our fast stored query engine, Clade a taxonomy/classification prototype and even some file format extractors.

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