Using Solr in Django for Full-Text Searching via Solango (Friday, January 01, 2010) - I've been doing quite a bit of work with Solr lately, both at the office and at home and, by golly, I love it! It's very powerful and simple to integrate with regardless of your platform. In this post I'll explain how to use Solr as a data-store independent search provider for Django projects. I'll assume that you have a functional Solr install and generally understand
Faceted Queries on acts_as_solr Associations (Thursday, May 20, 2010) - Recently in a rails app that employs Solr (via the acts_as_solr plugin) I've had the need to produce aggregate counts of entities on the far end of a many-to-many relationship. Essentially a tag cloud. My first attempt was to keep it entirely in ActiveRecord which resulted in a proliferation of SQL command executions. Obviously that wasn't performant. Sure it
Solr Data Access in Ruby with SolrMapper (Tuesday, October 26, 2010) - Recently my employer (The Skunkworx) released our first open source project, SolrMapper. Like the readme says, it's a Ruby Object Document Mapper for the Apache Foundation's Solr search platform. It's loosely patterned after ActiveRecord and MongoMapper so it should feel somewhat familiar. What differentiates SolrMapper from many other Solr libraries is that it's
Monitoring Solr with LucidGaze (Sunday, February 21, 2010) - As a professional DBA I'm always interested in monitoring systems. I have to know what's going on with my systems. Even in a world with automatic scaling strategies and automatic tuning humans have to be in the loop. Let's face it, sometimes automatic things don't work. Worse yet they sometimes automatically do what you said, not what you meant:) As I've
Quick Notes on ScriptTransformers in Solr DataImportHandlers (Saturday, March 20, 2010) - One thing that's impressed me with Solr is the flexibility of the Data Import Handlers (DIHs). When I was new to Solr there were several times I thought for sure I'd have to write my own extension of DataImportHandler. Every time that's happened I've been wrong. A transformer or something handled my needs. Sometimes it's wonderful to be wrong! Especially when
Employing Solr/Lucene with SQL Server for Full-Text Searching (Saturday, December 05, 2009) - I've been fiddling with Lucene a good bit of late and have been quite impressed. It's more than just a "blazing fast" full-text indexing system, especially when implemented via Solr. With Solr it becomes an incredibly scalable, full-featured and extensible search engine platform. I had always assumed that the Lucene stack wasn't for me. For the most part I
Solrnet, a Solr Client Library for .Net (Monday, March 08, 2010) - One of the strength's of Solr is it's ease of consumption by other platforms due to its REST API and response writers which include XML, JSON, native Ruby and native Python code. If you're trying to consume a Solr service from .Net you could easily use a WebClient and parse the results with .Net's System.Xml namespace and perhaps even build an object wrapper on
