Another Lucene Eurocon is a history

Another Lucene Eurocon is a history. That was a very intense two days, where the basic problem was: which of the three lectures go to. Sometimes the choice was very difficult, the only hope is that this year all the presentations were recorded and will soon be available on the web.

For us the most important was the second day and the presentation of the results of our work: Understanding & Visualising Solr ‘explain’ Information. The presentation consisted of two parts. First, the theoretical, described what Solr presents about the validity of the returned document. This information, unfortunately, do not belong to the most readable, especially when the search is done on many fields, often using dedicated query parser (the screenshot contains explain fragment describing a hit in only one document (!)).

Przykładowy explain

The situation gets worse because the questions from the client about the documents positioning are one of the most time consuming ones during the project.

The second part of the presentation showed what we decided to do with this problem. The idea came after seeing explain.depesz.com – a similar tool for visualization of information provided by the postgreSQL database.

In retrospect, our explain seems to be a good idea. Although its not finished we are using the tool almost everyday. What’s more – the Lucene Eurocon presentation showed us that there is also considerable interest in the community for a tool like this. Thank you for your kind words and the promises of sending us your own modules.

The current version explain.solr.pl focuses on reading the information generated by the solr 3.x. We are currently working on going public, and (somewhat later) the opensourcing the code.

To sum up the plans for the nearest future are quite ambitious:)

  1. Firstly – the chronicler’s duty – we will try to describe how Lucene Eurocon 2011 looked from our perspective. We plan to publish two entries – each of which will be dedicated to one day of the conference. That is something to read before they appear on the official videos from the conference.
  2. Opening explain.solr.pl for a wide audience:)
  3. Publication of explain.solr.pl code (github)
  4. Back to more regular posts about Solr.

Keep your fingers crossed:)

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