The Apache way of developing open source software relies on an active community of users, contributors and developers. All of us can contribute in some way or another. Being a committer means that you participate actively in the software development work and have write access to the source code repository. Each project is lead by a the PMC (Project Management Committee) which consists of some of the committers taking an extra responsibility of staking out the future of the project. (more…)

We at Cominvent have often had the need to visualize the internal architecture of Apache Solr in order to explain both the relationships of the components as well as the flow of data and queries. The result is this conceptual architecture diagram, clearly showing how Solr relates to the app-server, how cores relate to a Solr instance, how documents enter through an UpdateRequestHandler, through an UpdateChain and Analysis and into the Lucene index etc.

The drawing is created using Google draw, and the original is shared on Google Docs. We have licensed the diagram under the very permissive CC-by license which lets you use, modify and re-distribute the diagram, even commercially, as long as you give attribution with link to Cominvent. To get started, simply:

1. Click the thumbnail (link) which will open Google Docs (log in to your Google Account)
2. To make your own copy, select “Make a copy…” in the File menu
3. Make sure to keep the CC license logo and a link to www.cominvent.com
4. Please share your edits with the community if you think it is useful to others

Comments are welcome!

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.

Cominvent is the first company in Scandinavia to offer professional classroom training for the Open Source search engine Apache Solr. Last week we conducted a training in Denmark, and we plan for a regular schedule in Oslo and on-demand elsewhere in Europe.

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Apache Solr is a very capable enterprise search platform, doing most things you would expect from such a solution. But what about GEO sensitive applications like Yellow-pages, maps search, sort by distance to X etc? The big commercial systems such as FAST, Autonomy and Endecca, have it but Apache Lucene/Solr does not seem to support GEO search, or what? (more…)