Hi,

----- Original Message ----
From: J. Delgado <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: java-dev@lucene.apache.org
Sent: Sunday, September 7, 2008 4:04:58 AM
Subject: Re: Realtime Search for Social Networks Collaboration


On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 1:36 AM, Otis Gospodnetic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Regarding real-time search and Solr, my feeling is the focus should be on first 
adding real-time search to Lucene, and then we'll figure out how to incorporate 
that into Solr later.
 
Otis, what do you mean exactly by "adding real-time search to Lucene"?  Note 
that Lucene, being a indexing/search library (and not a full blown search 
engine), is by definition "real-time": once you add/write a document to the 
index it becomes immediately searchable and if a document is logically deleted 
and no longer returned in a search, though physical deletion happens during an 
index optimization.

OG: When I think about real-time search I see it as: "Make the newly added 
document show up in search results without closing and reopening the whole 
index with IndexWriter.  In other words, minimize re-reading of the 
old/unchanged data just to be able to see the newly added data."

I believe this is similar to what IndexReader.reopen does.... and Jason does 
make use of it.

Otis


Now, the problem of adding/deletingdocuments in bulk, as part of a transaction 
and making these documents available for search immediately after the 
transaction is commited sounds more like a search engine problem (i.e. SOLR, 
Nutch, Ocean), specially if these transactions are known to be I/O expensive 
and thus are usually implemented bached proceeses with some kind of sync 
mechanism, which makes them non real-time.

For example, in my previous life, I designed and help implement a 
quasi-realtime enterprise search engine using Lucene, having a set of 
multi-threaded indexers hitting a set of multiple indexes alocatted accross 
different search services which powered a broker based distributed search 
interface. The most recent documents provided to the indexers were always added 
to the smaller in-memory (RAM) indexes which usually could absorbe the load of 
a bulk "add" transaction and later would be merged into larger disk based 
indexes and then flushed to make them ready to absorbe new fresh docs. We even 
had further partitioning of the indexes that reflected time periods with caps 
on size for them to be merged into older more archive based indexes which were 
used less (yes the search engine default search was on data no more than 1 
month old, though user could open the time window by including archives).

As for SOLR and OCEAN,  I would argue that these semi-structured search engines 
are becomming more and more like relational databases with full-text search 
capablities (without the benefit of full reletional algebra -- for example 
joins are not possible using SOLR). Notice that "real-time" CRUD operations and 
transactionality are core DB concepts adn have been studied and developed by 
database communities for aquite long time. There has been recent efforts on how 
to effeciently integrate Lucene into releational databases (see Lucene JVM 
ORACLE integration, see 
http://marceloochoa.blogspot.com/2007/09/running-lucene-inside-your-oracle-jvm.html)

I think we should seriously look at joining efforts with open-source Database 
engine projects, written in Java (see 
http://java-source.net/open-source/database-engines) in order to blend IR and 
ORM for once and for all.

-- Joaquin 
 
 


I've read Jason's Wiki as well.  Actually, I had to read it a number of times 
to understand bits and pieces of it.  I have to admit there is still some 
fuzziness about the whole things in my head - is "Ocean" something that already 
works, a separate project on googlecode.com?  I think so.  If so, and if you 
are working on getting it integrated into Lucene, would it make it less 
confusing to just refer to it as "real-time search", so there is no confusion?

If this is to be initially integrated into Lucene, why are things like 
replication, crowding/field collapsing, locallucene, name service, tag index, 
etc. all mentioned there on the Wiki and bundled with description of how 
real-time search works and is to be implemented?  I suppose mentioning 
replication kind-of makes sense because the replication approach is closely 
tied to real-time search - all query nodes need to see index changes fast.  But 
Lucene itself offers no replication mechanism, so maybe the replication is 
something to figure out separately, say on the Solr level, later on "once we 
get there".  I think even just the essential real-time search requires 
substantial changes to Lucene (I remember seeing large patches in JIRA), which 
makes it hard to digest, understand, comment on, and ultimately commit (hence 
the luke warm response, I think).  Bringing other non-essential elements into 
discussion at the same time makes it more difficult t o
 process all this new stuff, at least for me.  Am I the only one who finds this 
hard?

That said, it sounds like we have some discussion going (Karl...), so I look 
forward to understanding more! :)


Otis
--
Sematext -- http://sematext.com/ -- Lucene - Solr - Nutch




----- Original Message ----
> From: Yonik Seeley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: java-dev@lucene.apache.org
> Sent: Thursday, September 4, 2008 10:13:32 AM
> Subject: Re: Realtime Search for Social Networks Collaboration
>
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Jason Rutherglen

> wrote:
> > I also think it's got a
> > lot of things now which makes integration difficult to do properly.
>
> I agree, and that's why the major bump in version number rather than
> minor - we recognize that some features will need some amount of
> rearchitecture.
>
> > I think the problem with integration with SOLR is it was designed with
> > a different problem set in mind than Ocean, originally the CNET
> > shopping application.
>
> That was the first use of Solr, but it actually existed before that
> w/o any defined use other than to be a "plan B" alternative to MySQL
> based search servers (that's actually where some of the parameter
> names come from... the default /select URL instead of /search, the
> "rows" parameter, etc).
>
> But you're right... some things like the replication strategy were
> designed (well, borrowed from Doug to be exact) with the idea that it
> would be OK to have slightly "stale" views of the data in the range of
> minutes.  It just made things easier/possible at the time.  But tons
> of Solr and Lucene users want almost instantaneous visibility of added
> documents, if they can get it.  It's hardly restricted to social
> network applications.
>
> Bottom line is that Solr aims to be a general enterprise search
> platform, and getting as real-time as we can get, and as scalable as
> we can get are some of the top priorities going forward.
>
> -Yonik
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to