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Elephant Scale

Solr for Developers

Enable participants to install, configure, and optimize Solr search applications-including faceting, indexing pipelines, and SolrCloud-for high‑relevance, scalable search solutions.

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Audience: Developers, business users, administrators

Duration: Two days, optional third day for developers

Format: Lectures and hands‑on labs (50% lecture, 50% lab)

Overview

This course introduces students to the Solr platform. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and labs students will gain hands‑on experience configuring effective search and indexing.

Objective

Enable participants to install, configure, and optimize Solr search applications-including faceting, indexing pipelines, and SolrCloud-for high‑relevance, scalable search solutions.

What You Will Learn

  • Solr installation and configuration
  • Solr architecture and design
  • Faceting, indexing, and search
  • Advanced topics including spell checking, suggestions, Multicore, and SolrCloud.

Course Details

Audience: Developers, business users, administrators

Duration: Two days, optional third day for developers

Format: Lectures and hands‑on labs (50% lecture, 50% lab)

Prerequisites:

All attendees should be experienced technical staff with a background in web application operations and, preferably, development.

Setup: Amazon EC2 servers will be provided for installation, administration, and lab work • SSH client • Browser • Zero Install

Detailed Outline

  • Solr Overview
  • Installing and running Solr
  • Adding content to Solr
  • Reading a Solr XML response
  • Changing parameters in the URL
  • Using the browse interface
  • Labs: install Solr, run queries
  • Sorting results
  • Query parsers
  • More queries
  • Hardwiring request parameters
  • Adding fields to the default search
  • Faceting
  • Result grouping
  • Labs: advanced queries, experiment with faceted search
  • Adding your own content to Solr
  • Deleting data from Solr
  • Building a bookstore search
  • Adding book data
  • Exploring the book data
  • Dedupe update processor
  • Labs: indexing various document collections
  • Adding fields to the schema
  • Analyzing text
  • Labs: customize Solr schema
  • Field weighting
  • Phrase queries
  • Function queries
  • Fuzzier search
  • Sounds‑like
  • Labs: implementing queries for relevance
  • More‑like‑this
  • Geospatial
  • Spell checking
  • Suggestions
  • Highlighting
  • Pseudo‑fields
  • Pseudo‑joins
  • Multilanguage
  • Labs: implementing spell checking and suggestions
  • Adding more kinds of data
  • Labs: creating and administering cores
  • Introduction
  • How SolrCloud works
  • Commit strategies
  • ZooKeeper
  • Managing Solr config files
  • Labs: administer SolrCloud
  • Talking to Solr through REST
  • Configuration
  • Indexing and searching
  • Solr and Spring
  • Labs: code to read and write Solr index, exercise in Spring with Solr
  • Building a Lucene index
  • Searching, viewing, debugging
  • Extracting text with Tika
  • Scaling Lucene indices on clusters
  • Lucene performance tuning
  • Labs: coding with Lucene
  • Other approaches to search
  • ElasticSearch
  • DataStax Enterprise: Solr+Cassandra
  • Cloudera Solr integration
  • Blur
  • Future directions

Ready to Get Started?

Contact us to learn more about this course and schedule your training.