Amazon Elasticsearch Service vs. Apache Solr

Elasticsearch is a good alternative to relational databases for setting up complex searching of data. It's inbuilt features for slicing the data [in] different ways and its ability to add weights to search results makes it easy to set up complex searching scenarios. Given that data must be pushed to this service, it may be best suited for data that is not changing very rapidly.

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Solr spins up nicely and works effectively for small enterprise environments providing helpful mechanisms for fuzzy searches and facetted searching. For larger enterprises with complex business solutions you'll find the need to hire an expert Solr engineer to optimize the powerful platform to your needs. Internationalization is tricky with Solr and many hosting solutions may limit you to a latin character set.

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• Fast Index based search.
• Scalable.
• Best for structured and unstructured data.

• Easy to get started with Apache Solr. Whether it is tackling a setup issue or trying to learn some of the more advanced features, there are plenty of resources to help you out and get you going.
• Performance. Apache Solr allows for a lot of custom tuning (if needed) and provides great out of the box performance for searching on large data sets.
• Maintenance. After setting up Solr in a production environment there are plenty of tools provided to help you maintain and update your application. Apache Solr comes with great fault tolerance built in and has proven to be very reliable.

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• Really satisfied with this service from Amazon.

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• These examples are due to the way we use Apache Solr. I think we have had the same problems with other NoSQL databases (but perhaps not the same solution). High data volumes of data and a lot of users were the causes.
• We have lot of classifications and lot of data for each classification. This gave us several problems:
• First: We couldn't keep all our data in Solr. Then we have all data in our MySQL DB and searching data in Solr. So we need to be sure to update and match the 2 databases in the same time.
• Second: We needed several load balanced Solr databases.
• Third: We needed to update all the databases and keep old data status.
• If I don't speak about problems due to our lack of experience, the main Solr problem came from frequency of updates vs validation of several database. We encountered several locks due to this (our ops team didn't want to use real clustering, so all DB weren't updated). Problem messages were not always clear and we several days to understand the problems.

Apache Solr is a ready-to-use product addressing specific use cases such as keyword searches from a huge set of data documents.

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• Elasticsearch has allowed us to spend more time on building features and less time on optimizing search queries

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• Improved response time in e-commerce websites.
• Developer's job is easier with Apache Solr in use.
• Customization in filtering and sorting is possible.

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