Course Syllabus

As improvements are made to the course, the actual syllabus may differ in part from what is listed below.

• Principals of Search
  • Sample search applications and use cases
• Solr Terminology
  • Key terms and definitions
• An Introduction to Solr Search
  • Request handlers and response writers; sample searches; Solr’s Admin application; a survey of what happens in a running Solr application. We will also a look at the VelocityResponseWriter to see an example of one of the many ways that Solr can return results.
• Solr Features Overview
  • Main Solr features and characteristics
• Going Further with Solr Search
  • An overview of search parameters, Solr query syntax, filter and range queries, result sets
  • Executing searches using the SolrJ API to query the Solr server from within a Java application
  • Dismax Query Parser
• Lucene as the Underlying Search Library
  • Lucene internals, Nutch and Mahout, the Luke utility: understanding the internals of a Lucene index
• Basic Solr Architecture
  • Details of the file system structure of the Solr home directory, update handlers, admin console, and replication
• Designing Solr Applications
  • Project definition, data model, data sources, application requirements, designing Solr schema, and using qualifiers to create controlled entry points for searching
• Solr Configuration
  • Using Solr config files and schema.xml files, how to use the admin console’s Schema Browser Tool
• Introduction to Analysis
  • Solr’s analysis process and how to use analyzers and token filters; use of the admin analysis tool to see how the analysis stack—created to tokenize content—affects a query
  • Findability: How configuration files and decisions will impact the findability and relevancy of your search results; filters used in the analysis stack and the direct impact on relevance of search results.
• Understanding Relevance
  • Determining relevance quality, using scoring models, payloads, and debugging relevance issues
  • How to use a query-time field boost to improve relevance
• Findability and Domain Knowledge
  • How to plan and implement for best findability
  • Compare text and string field types for facets: designing a field for faceting to provide a way to navigate the index
  • Building a query filter: adding a query filter that will only return Microsoft Word documents as results
  • Using and configuring synonyms to improve findability
• Solr Indexing
  • Indexing document files into the Solr index; how Solr XML documents are POSTed to Solr, and the details of the XML structure
  • Batch Indexing – using a simple command-line indexing application
• Using Solr’s Data Import Handler
  • Use of the DataImportHandler as a workflow engine for fetching and indexing data, applying the Data Import Handler it to import an RSS feed into an index
• Faceted Searching with Solr
  • Faceted Search – how to implement faceting in Solr, using SolrJ
  • Planning for Faceting - evaluating your domain-specific needs for faceted search; configuring index fields in schema.xml so they are available for faceted searches
• Other Search Features and Solr Contrib
  • Enable and configure highlighting, processing highlighted fragments that are returned
  • Query elevation and boosting
  • Clustering content dynamically to organize collections of documents into thematic categories
  • Build a Spell Checking Index, adding fields and field type to the schema to use the SpellCheckComponent.
• Japanese Support (Basis Technology-created supplemental course material to the Lucid Imagination course material)
  • N-gram and Morphological Analysis
  • Solr Integration with the Rosette linguistics platform
• Introduction to Solr Administration and Operations
  • Index maintenance and back-up
  • Replication, monitoring, and scaling Solr
  • Using JConsole to monitor the JVM for a running indexing job and the Solr server
• Troubleshooting Your Search Application
  • Diagnosing and fixing common problems, performance and user search result issues
• Open Source Community
  • How it works, how to participate, and how to leverage resources