First of the speakers was Richard Pijnenburg with a surprisingly brief talk on Puppet and Elasticsearch – brief, because integrating the two is apparently very simple, requiring only a few lines of Puppet code. Some questions from the floor sparked a discussion of combining Puppet and Vagrant for setting up Elasticsearch instances: apparently very soon we’ll see a complete demo instance of Elasticsearch built using these technologies and including some example data, which will be very useful for those wanting to get started with the engine (here’s some more on this combination).

Next was Amit Talhan, ably assisted by Geza Kerekes, both from AlignAlytics who have been using Elasticsearch both as a data store, reporting store and more recently for analysing data from a survey of all the retail outlets in Nigeria. Generating a wealth of data across up to 1000 fields, including geolocation data harvested every five seconds, this survey could have been difficult if not impossible to handle using a traditional SQL database, but many of their colleagues were very used to SQL syntax and methods for analyzing data. Amit and Geza explained how they have used Elasticsearch and in particular aggregations to provide functionality such as checking for bad reporting by surveyors and unexpectedly high density areas (such as markets, where there may be 200 retail outlets in a few square metres). One challenge seems to have been how to explain to colleagues from the data analysis community that Elasticsearch can provide some, but not all of the functionality of a traditional database, but that alternative ways of indexing and querying data can be used to solve the same problems. Interestingly, performance testing by AlignAlytics proved that BigStep, a provider of ‘bare metal’ cloud hosting, could provide much better performance than their own dedicated servers.

Next was Mark Harwood with another of his fascinating investigations into how Elasticsearch can be used for analysis of user behaviour, showing how after a bad personal experience buying a new battery that turned out to be second-hand, he identified Amazon.com vendors with suspiciously positive reviews. He also discussed how behaviour-based term suggesters might be built using Elasticsearch’s significant_terms aggregration. His demonstration did remind me slightly of Xapian’s relevance feedback feature. I heard several people later say that they wished they had time for some of the fun projects Mark seems to work on!

The event finished with some lively discussion and some free pizza courtesy of Elasticsearch (the company). Thanks to Yann Cluchey as ever for organising the event and I look forward to seeing a few of the attendees in Cambridge soon – we’re only an hour or so by train from Cambridge plus a ten minute walk to the venue, so it should be an easy trip!

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Hugo Pickford-Wardle from Rely Consultancy kicked off with a discussion about how ElasticSearch allows for rapid ‘hard prototyping’ – a way to very quickly test the feasibility of a business idea, and/or to demonstrate previously impossible functionality using open source software. His talk focussed on how a search engine can help to surface content from previously unconnected and inaccessible ‘data islands’ and can help promote re-use and repurposing of the data, and can lead clients to understand the value of committing to funding further development. Examples included a new search over planning applications for Westminster City Council. Interestingly, Hugo mentioned that during one project ElasticSearch was found to be 10 times faster than the closed source (and very expensive) Autonomy IDOL search engine.

Next was Indy Tharmakumar from our hosts Goldman Sachs, showing how his team have built powerful support systems using ElasticSearch to index log data. Using 32 1 core CPU instances the system they have built can store 1.2 billion log lines with a throughput up to 40,000 messages a second (the systems monitored produce 5TB of log data every day). Log data is queued up in Redis, distributed to many Logstash processes, indexed by Elasticsearch with a Kibana front end. They learned that Logstash can be particularly CPU intensive but Elasticsearch itself scales extremely well. Future plans include considering Apache Kafka as a data backbone.

The third presentation was by Clinton Gormley of ElasticSearch, talking about the new cross field matching features that allow term frequencies to be summed across several fields, preventing certain cases where traditional matching techniques based on Lucene‘s TF/IDF ranking model can produce some unexpected behaviour. Most interesting for me was seeing Marvel, a new product from ElasticSearch (the company), containing the Sense developer console allowing for on-the-fly experimentation. I believe this started as a Chrome plugin.

The last talk, by Mark Harwood, again from ElasticSearch, was the most interesting for me. Mark demonstrated how to use a new feature (planned for the 1.1 release, or possibly later), an Aggregator for significant terms. This allows one to spot anomalies in a data set – ‘uncommon common’ occurrences as Mark described it. His prototype showed a way to visualise UK crime data using Google Earth, identifying areas of the country where certain crimes are most reported – examples including bike theft here in Cambridge (which we’re sadly aware of!). Mark’s Twitter account has some further information and pictures. This kind of technique allows for very powerful analytics capabilities to be built using Elasticsearch to spot anomalies such as compromised credit cards and to use visualisation to further identify the guilty party, for example a hacked online merchant. As Mark said, it’s important to remember that the underlying Lucene search library counts everything – and we can use those counts in some very interesting ways.
UPDATE Mark has posted some code from his demo here.

The evening closed with networking, pizza and beer with a great view over the City – thanks to Yann Cluchey for organising the event. We have our own Cambridge Search Meetup next week and we’re also featuring ElasticSearch, as does the London Search Meetup a few weeks later – hope to see you there!

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