Cominvent has been delivering professional training within enterprise search for more than 7 years. First on the FAST platform, and then on Solr/Lucene. We were the first to introduce Solr training in Europe.

We have now expanded our comprehensive training offering, as shown in the training modules illustration, covering the whole range from short half-day introduction for anyone to full certification track for developers.

Go visit our training site www.solrtraining.com and sign up for the training which fits you best.

Lucene guru Mike McCandless just released on his blog an impressive piece of work visualizing how Lucene MergePolicy really works through a series of YouTube videos. He feeds Solr with a 10Gb Wikipedia dump and also some random add/delete data source, and then records every single segment written and merged during the whole process.

Mike also introduces a cool new merge policy called TieredMergePolicy (LUCENE-854) which is much smarter and slightly more efficient than the default one. Hope this becomes the new default merge policy in Solr.

Open Source Search is gaining more and more traction. First you had Lucene (2001), giving great search for programmers. Then we got Solr (2006) making search accessible for non programmers, but a certain level of expertise is still needed. And then came Constellio, an open source (GPL) enterprise search distribution (distro) built on Solr, adding a slick GUI, connector and crawling support and more.

Say again. A Solr distro?

I call it “distro” because I like to compare the evolution to what we have seen in GNU/Linux. First there was the Linux core. Then there was the GNU tools that made Linux so much more usable but still only for engineers comfortable with the command line. And last, companies like RedHat and Suse built complete distros including modern GUI, ready-to use tools such as OpenOffice, Thunderbird and more. Without these distros, Linux would just have been a “core” leaving to the user to add the extra sugar. (more…)

Book cover © Amazon & Wrox

Over due by several years, Wrox just published a book about Microsoft Enterprise Search, including the different FAST flavours. Bravo!

You can ask how all the users of FAST technology could have managed for so many years without some public source of learning the products. Up until now FAST/MS and their partners have been the sole source of learning FAST Search [1]. Now, we’re part of that eco-system and may have profited on the lack of material available, but that’s another story. (more…)

After the Microsoft takeover of FAST almost three years ago, it’s been silent and no new updates of ESP. We all know that MS discontinued Linux support, and that the major focus with the FAST technology has been to power the high-end search for Sharepoint 2010. ESP was forked and heavily modified to integrate smoothly with Windows, SQL server, AD, PowerShell and more, and it made the leap to 64 bit – finally!

But what about non Sharepoint users? MS has an offering to them as well, called FAST Search for Internet Sites. Read Comperio’s excellent blog article about it. A bit disappointing that the core is still the more than three year old ESP5.3 wrapped in new MS APIs, but cool that you can still hack the ESP internals.. (more…)