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Apache Solr High Performance
Apache Solr High Performance

Apache Solr High Performance: In setting up Apache Solr, you'll want to ensure it's achieving optimum search results with maximum efficiency. This book shows you just how to achieve that with a comprehensive tutorial including troubleshooting.

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Apache Solr High Performance

Chapter 2. Boost Your Search

In this chapter, we will learn different ways to boost our search using query parsers and various robust function queries such as field reference, function reference, and function query boosting based on different criteria. We will cover the following topics:

  • Scoring

  • The dismax query parser

  • Function queries

So, let us get started.

Scoring


You might come across scenarios where your search engine should be capable enough to search and display appropriate search results from a large collection of documents, especially when the visitor is not really sure of what he/she intends to search.

In this section, we will learn about the basic concepts of how Solr ranks the documents and later step into how we can tweak the way Solr ranks and renders the search results.

We must keep in mind that the score is not a term that holds an absolute value; instead, it holds a relative value with respect to the maximum score and is normalized to fall between 0 and 1.0. The primary objective behind implementing a score is to narrow down the field list to a smaller set by mapping the fields together and then inject the smaller set to the search engine. Doing so helps the search engine understand the request better and serve the requester in a more appropriate way.

To understand the preceding objective better, let us assume we have an event that...

The dismax query parser


Before we understand how to boost our search using the dismax query parser, we will learn what a dismax query parser is and the features that make it more demanding than the Lucene query parser.

While using the Lucene query parser, a very vital problem was noticed. It restricts the query to be well formed, with certain syntax rules that have balanced quotes and parenthesis. The Lucene query parser is not sophisticated enough to understand that the end users might be laymen. Thus, these users might type anything for a query as they are unaware of such restrictions and are prone to end up with either an error or unexpected search results.

To tackle such situations, the dismax query parser came into play. It has been named after Lucene's DisjunctionMaxQuery, which addresses the previously discussed issue along with incorporating a number of features that enhance search relevancy (that is, boosting or scoring).

Now, let us do a comparative study of the features provided...

Function queries


A function query can be defined as a user-specified Solr function that is usually mathematical in nature and is supported by dismax, edismax, and other standard query parsers. It enables you to generate a relevancy score based on the actual value of one or more numeric fields. Since function queries are technical, they are so robust that they can be used in instances where the queries' context comes into picture. The instances include searching, filtering, faceting, sorting, and so on.

Now, we will understand a few of the ways by which we can incorporate a function query into our Solr instance. They are as follows:

  • The dismax query parser (the bf and boost parameters): As we already discussed earlier in this chapter, the bf and boost parameters boost the user query score by adding or multiplying the function query. In the upcoming section, we will learn how to derive a function query in depth using a few examples.

  • The boost query parser: Unlike the boost parameter in dismax...

Summary


In this chapter, we covered advanced topics associated with scoring, function queries, and so on. We began with a background on Lucene scoring, different terminologies and their significance, and learned query-time and index-time boosting. We also learned how to troubleshoot your queries and scoring and headed towards more complex and important topics such as different ways to use the dismax query parser and how it is better than Lucene's DisjunctionMaxQuery. Apart from this, we learned the ways of boosting our search based on varied circumstances, for instance, automatic phrase boosting and partial phrase boosting, what are the boost queries and boost functions and how can they be used. We also covered advanced concepts of function queries such as field and function references, different mathematical operations, including geometric or trigonometric operations, and how to implement formulas such as logarithm, reciprocal, and linear in an intention to boost your function queries.

In...

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Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Mar 25, 2014
Length: 124 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782164821
Vendor :
Apache
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Product Details

Publication date : Mar 25, 2014
Length: 124 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782164821
Vendor :
Apache
Category :
Languages :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

6 Chapters
Installing Solr Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Boost Your Search Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Performance Optimization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Additional Performance Optimization Techniques Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Troubleshooting Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Performance Optimization with ZooKeeper Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 0%
4 star 66.7%
3 star 33.3%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Stefan Ritter May 25, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I feel it's always hard to write a book for more advanced topics because it's easy to miss the mark on your audience and in this case I'd say the author has done well. Almost no pages are wasted on beginners or setup information, instead you dive right into search query optimisations.My favourite part of the book is the chapter on Troubleshooting. The problems covered in that chapter are bound to happen to everyone dealing with Solr especially when you are setting up and hosting it yourself. For someone relatively new to Solr this is a great pool of knowledge. A knowledge you would otherwise only get through tedious trial and error, I really felt I could benefit from the author’s experience here!That said considering this is a book on performance I was missing chapters on fields, schema and index design, and a chapter on benchmarking your performance improvements. This book is really a collection of a best practices and in that sense it's great and a good read for every Solr dev who wants to go beyond the basic setup.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Stephan Hochhaus Jun 11, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I have recently completed a Solr project and was looking to improve the overall performance. Apache Solr High Performance by Surrenda Mohan turned out to be an extremely helpful resource, but I wish I had used it earlier in my development and not only after the project went live to improve shortcomings.There are six chapters in this rather short book, some of them did not fully apply to my use case. For example there is a chapter about installing Solr, which thankfully is only a few pages and only about using Windows. The rest however is applicable to all operating systems. The second chapter was for me the most valuable, covering the entire topic of boosting your search. You will learn a lot about how Solr (or Lucene) work behind the scenes and most likely the knowledge you gain here will have an impact on the way your application works. I ended up refactoring my query creation and indeed it enhanced the user experience by far. The accuracy was much better (therefore effectively limiting the need to create multiple queries from a user's perspective).As I did not use a Solr cloud only the caching aspects were interesting to me from the third chapter about performance optimization. Therefore also chapter 6 about ZooKeeper (when using multiple Solr servers) did not apply for me. The additional performance tricks of the fourth and the troubleshooting hints of the chapter fifth chapter on the other hand were quite interesting, even if I did not need all of them (yet?).If you are using Solr and you are at a point where you have things working but there are still question marks on many areas for you, this book is a valuable read to gain some hands-on knowledge to improve your projects. I suggest you get a copy before your project goes live as it will save you a bit of rewriting code after go live.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
A. Mefford Aug 27, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
I recently read several SOLR books, brushing up my skills making sure that I was current with the technology. This fell short of the others and the promise of its title.The books that I read in order of preference were: Mastering Apache Solr: A practical guide to get to grips with Apache Solr Scaling Big Data with Hadoop and Solr (Community Experience Distilled) Apache Solr High Performance This book contains what I consider to be one of the most bizarre inclusions, Chapter 1 shows how to install SOLR as a service on windows. Why you would ever want to do that is beyond me, I can only assume that the offer felt this inclusion would make the topic more accessible to those on the Windows platform. I certainly hope nobody intends to run a serious SOLR installation on the Windows platform. This is a recipe for frustration. If however you are insistent in running on Windows, this is the book for you.Chapter 2 provides excellent coverage of scoring and the various ways to leverage and control scoring within SOLR.Chapter 3 is about performance optimization. This chapter is good, but really just talks about the features that make SOLR performant. It provides detail on how to configure and use those features, but it does not address what I have found in my experience to be the crux of the problem of SOLR performance, system tuning.Chapter 4 is labelled Additional Performance Optimization, but has little to do with performance and more to do with advanced SOLR features. In fact use of most of these features can severely impact performance. This chapter covers similar document queries, sorting by function, homophones, stopwords and word filtering.Chapter 5 is Troubleshooting. This chapter covers some very common scenarios that will inevitably happen in a production SOLR environment. If nothing else the list of scenarios can be very useful in creating your disaster recovery plan. That said, the list is not really complete, and the coverage is light. For example one of the sections is basically just covering the use of optimize, as though that is a troubleshooting technique, and not a regular best practice. The section on garbage collection is a good start, but really any book on SOLR should have a chapter dedicated to GC.Chapter 6 is poorly named, "Performance Optimization with ZooKeeper". It should have just been named "ZooKeeper". ZooKeeper does nothing to improve the performance of SOLR, though it is a requisite stepping stone to the world of SOLR Cloud. This chapter also does not discuss in detail making ZooKeeper performant. Rather this chapter is a ZooKeeper tutorial, and a pretty good one.And the book abruptly ends. No further coverage of SOLR Cloud. No coverage of high performance indexing or data ingestion. No discussion of tuning SOLR for large installations, scaling search, balancing memory allocations, and so on. There is a smattering of information throughout about performance optimized schemas, but it is not collected or concise. I feel like the author hit his deadline and submitted what he had.This book was a good start, but falls short of being more than an introduction to SOLR and certainly does not live up to its name. This book provided very little in the way of code samples. Most of the topics were covered at a very high level without significant detail. For these reasons I rate it 3 stars.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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