Lucene Revolution 2013, Dublin: day 2 -

A slow start to the day, possibly due to the aftereffects of the conference party the night before, but the stadium was still buzzing. I went to Rafal Kuć’s talk on SolrCloud which is becoming the standard way to build scalable Solr installations (we have two projects underway that use it). The shard splitting features in recent releases of Solr were interesting – previously one would either have to re-index the whole collection to a new set of shards, or more often over-allocate the number of shards to cope with a future increase in size, this method allows you to split an existing shard into two.

As our own talk was looming (and we needed to practise) I missed the next session unfortunately, although I hear from colleagues that the talk on High Performance JSON Search and Relational Faceted Browsing was good. We then broke for lunch during which we had a chance to test an idea Upayavira had come up with in the pub the night before: whether leeks are suitable for juggling, given that none of us had brought any proper equipment! They did work, but only briefly – luckily the stadium staff were very good natured about sweeping up the remains afterwards.

Our talk on Turning Search Upside Down: Using Lucene for Very Fast Stored Queries was next, during which I was ably assisted by Alan Woodward who has done the majority of the work during some recent projects for media monitoring companies. We’re hoping to release an open source library, Luwak, based on this work very soon – watch this space!

UPDATE: The video of our talk is now available and so is Luwak!

After an interesting talk next by Adrien Grand on What’s in a Lucene Index (unfortunately as this overran a little, we missed the closing remarks) it was time to say our goodbyes and head home. Thanks to all the Lucidworks team for organising a fascinating and friendly event – all of our team found it interesting and it was great to catch up with friends old and new. See you next time!