Alex Pinkin
Alex Pinkin is a contributor to a number of open source projects including JBoss Application Server. He currently works as a lead developer on the Data Infrastructure team at Bazaarvoice. His team focuses on big data problems, analytics, and search. Bazaarvoice is utilizing Apache Lucene and SOLR to power features which are exposed to hundreds of millions of users on thousands of web sites. Alex lives in Austin, TX where he enjoys sunny weather and outdoor life when he is not glued to a computer.
November 9 5:00PM
Solr is an open source, Lucene based search platform originally developed by CNET and used by the likes of Netflix, Yelp, and StubHub which has been rapidly growing in popularity and features during the last few years. Learn how Solr can be used as a Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database along the lines of Cassandra, Memcached, and Redis. NoSQL data stores are regularly described as non-relational, distributed, internet-scalable and are used at both Facebook and Digg. This presentation will quickly cover the fundamentals of NoSQL data stores, the basics of Lucene, and what Solr brings to the table. Following that we will dive into the technical details of making Solr your primary query engine on large scale web applications, thus relegating your traditional relational database to little more than a simple key store. Real solutions to problems like handling four billion requests per month will be presented. We'll talk about sizing and configuring the Solr instances to maintain rapid response times under heavy load. We'll show you how to change the schema on a live system with tens of millions of documents indexed while supporting real-time results. And finally, we'll answer your questions about ways to work around the lack of transactions in Solr and how you can do all of this in a highly available solution.
Questions to be answered:
1. Why should I use Solr to relieve load from my relational database?
2. How is Solr better than the alternative NoSQL solutions already in place?
3. How do I address the pitfalls of working with Solr in large scale applications?
4. What things would be more difficult in Solr than if I had stuck with my relational database?
5. Is Solr a complete and competitive NoSQL datastore?
