Lucene/Solr London User Group – Alfresco & Datastax

We had another London user group Meetup last week, hosted by Reed.co.uk who also provided some tasty pizza – eaten under the ‘Love Mondays’ sign from their adverts, which now lives in their boardroom! A few new faces this time and a couple of great talks from two companies who have incorporated Solr into their platforms.

First up was Andy Hind, a founding developer of document management company Alfresco, who told us all about how they originally based their search capability on Lucene 2.4, then moved to Solr 4.4 and most recently version 4.9.1. Using Solr they have implemented often complex security requirements (originally using a PostFilter as Erik Hatcher describes and more recently in the query itself), structured queries (using Phrase and SpanQueries) and their own domain specific query language (DSL) – they can support SQL-like, Lucene and Google-like queries by passing them through parsers based on ANTLR to be served either by the search engine or whatever relational database Alfresco is using. The move to a recent version of Solr has allowed the most recent release of Alfresco to support various modern search features (facets, spelling suggestions etc.) but Andy did mention that so far they are not using SolrCloud for scaling, preferring to manage this themselves.

Next up was Sergio Bossa of Datastax, talking about how their Datastax Enterprise (DSE) product incorporates Solr searching within an Apache Cassandra cluster. Sergio has previously spoken at our Cambridge search meetup on a very similar subject, so I won’t repeat myself here, but the key point is that Solr lives directly on top of the Cassandra cluster, so you don’t have to worry about it at all – search features are directly available from the Cassandra APIs. Like Alfresco, this is an alternative to SolrCloud (assuming you also need a NoSQL database of course!).

Thanks again to Alex Rice for hosting the Meetup, to both our speakers and to all who came – we’ll return soon! In the meantime you may want to check out a few events coming later this year: Berlin Buzzwords, ApacheCon Europe and Lucene/Solr Revolution.

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