Download pdf - How to Gain Greater Business Intelligence from Lucene/Solr

Patrick BeaucampFounder of the Vanilla Project

Mail : [email protected]

How to Gain Greater Business Intelligence with Vanilla from Solr/Lucene

1LuceneRevolution, Boston

Presentation AgendaVanilla powered by Lucene- Report Indexation, Search Interface- External document management- evolution & constraints

Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption- Indexation, Storage, Search- Embeded Solr/Lucene- External Solr/Lucene Platform

Keys Benefit for Vanilla powered by Solr/Lucene- Cluster Architecture- Cache Mechanism- Support for enhanced search language


Flash maps and charts : Reports, Cubes and Dashboard

Vanilla Apps : Android and Iphone

Some Vanilla Features


Vanilla Powered by Lucene (1/6)Vanilla is a full Business Intelligence Platform that provide :- Reporting, Olap, Dashboard, Kpi, Maps Visualisation- Etl, Workflow, Document Management search Engine


Vanilla Powered by Lucene (2/6)Report Indexation- Search engine is Apache Lucene (summer 2010)- External Document & Vanilla Report are indexed- Different Indexation strategy for documents :

– No indexation– Real Time indexation– Late Indexation

2 modules to manage indexation strategy - Enterprise Services to set document property- Norparena to Manage Indexation


Vanilla Powered by Lucene (3/6)Search Interface- Search Interface available from Vanilla Portal- Search against Lucene index (inside Vanilla)- Search result is combined with Security on documents

– List contains all documents– Documents are ordered based on popularity


Vanilla Powered by Lucene (4/6)External document management- various document format are available (Lucene)- additional properties can be set on documents, for later useage in search criteria- check In / check Out on document for versioning- search is run on the latest document version


Vanilla Powered by Lucene (5/6)Evolution and constraints- No clustering available for search engine (embeded Api), as opposed to Vanilla Report Services- Limitation in language and keywords (internal search)- No cache to manage search resultset, as opposed to Vanilla dataset, powered by Memcached

- request from customers to be compliant with enterprise search engine → need to setup an external search architecture


Vanilla Powered by Lucene (6/6)


Embeded Lucene Api inside Vanilla Platform - Video


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (1/9)Solr/Lucene is the natural evolution of any embeded Lucene platform

Solr Version : 3.5

IndexationVanilla Lucene Index can be transfert & read by a Solr/Lucene(a Solr/Lucene index is not usable inside Vanilla Platform)

StorageVanilla search Indexed can be managed by a Solr/Lucene platform

SearchSearch language is compliant


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (2/9)Embeded Solr/Lucene inside Vanilla Platform

No need for any changed in Vanilla code : use of solrj Api

Immediatly provide additional features such as new Keywords

Potential upgrade to Solr/Lucene Enterprise


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (3/9)From Embeded Lucene to Embeded Solr/Lucene inside Vanilla Platform


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (4/9)Embeded Solr/Lucene inside Vanilla Platform - Video


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (5/9)Solr/Lucene Platform with a Vanilla Platform

Need for changes in Vanilla code, to separate document management, indexation & search Api → 10 man days workload

Document Management ApiEasy to move to any Cmis compliancy

Indexation & Search ApiSolr/Lucene oriented & compliant, but now open to any other Search Platform


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (6/9)Coding Before

Example of Code (Api) Before the split

- Direct use of the Lucene Api

- Parse the document content using Apache TIKA

- Generate Lucene's queries


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (7/9)Coding After

Example of Code (Api) After the split

- Easy to use Solrj Api

- Distributed search

- Indexation with automatic parsing (using Apache Tika)


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (8/9)Solr/Lucene Platform with Vanilla Platform - Screenshot


Step to Solr/Lucene Adoption (9/9)Solr/Lucene Platform with Vanilla Platform - Video


Key Benefits for Vanilla Powered by Solr/Lucene (1/4)

Clustering Search Architecture, outside of Vanilla

Search results clustering implementation (CarrotClusteringEngine) is based on the Carrot2 framework.



Additional query language to perform search

Solr Uses the Lucene Search Library and Extends it!

- A Real Data Schema, with Numeric Types, Dynamic Fields, Unique Keys- Powerful Extensions to the Lucene Query Language- Faceted Search and Filtering- Geospatial Search- Advanced, Configurable Text Analysis



New methods to manage result set (binary, Xml, Json)

Solr enterprise search server with a REST-like API. You put documents in it (called "indexing") via

XML, JSON or binary over HTTP. You query it via HTTP GET

and receive XML, JSON, or binary results

- Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities- Optimized for High Volume Web Traffic- Standards Based Open Interfaces - XML,JSON and HTTP



Cache Mechanism

Solr caches are associated with an Index Searcher

Three cache implementations : solr.LRUCache (LRU = Least Recently Used in memory),solr.FastLRUCache, solr.LFUCache (Least Frequenty Used)

Many configuration parameters for cache optimisation


Next StepsUpgrade to Solr 4.0

New features for Document cycle Management

Roadmap for better Internationalisation :- 10 languages available (not Japaneese)- Search Translation management

Documentations and tutorials available on our Web sites:

www.bpm-conseil.com and forge.bpm-conseil.com

Thanks for your attention
