New data analysis tools have been incorporated into modern industry. Companies with a large online presence need to utilise technology that is highly reliant on analytical technology.The approach businesses can develop their online business strategy is by using CMS (content management system) systems with an assessments of risk base. You can use these CMS features to make rational, data-driven decisions and automate a variety of online processes for their web strategy.
There are a range of new CMS tools that rely on data analysis. Two of the newest ones are Sitecore and Apache Solr. To be an expert in the sitecore domain, you should compulsory attend sitecore training where you can gain professional experience in building accurate online business models.
What is sitecore?
Sitecore is among the leading digital experience and CMS platforms that enables teams to launch and build products that fuel engagement and accelerate customer success through data-driven insights.
In a generic installation, Sitecore uses a search engine for two purposes:
Content Search – this is the default search mechanism for the Sitecore Experience Manager. The search engine indexes and finds content from a master, central, or web database.
xConnect Search – this search is used by the Sitecore Experience Platform. The search engine indexes and locates connections and experiences in the Experience Database.
What is Apache Solr?
Apache Solr is a popular enterprise search engine based on the Apache Lucene open source engine. It also uses state-of-the-art analytical features. Combined, these two innovations provide a great forum for delivering great customer experience in the quest for personalised and meaningful content in a scaled environment.
Solr operates with the Hypertext Markup Language Extensible Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Offers application programme interfaces (APIs) for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), Python, and Ruby. According to the Apache Lucene Project, Solr is offering capabilities that have made it popular with administrators, including:
- Indexing in near-real time
- Automated replication of index
- Logging of Server Statistics
- Automated failure and recovery
- Rich record scanning and indexing
- Multiple search indices
- User-Extensible Cache
- Built for high volume traffic
You may merge two tools to create an analytical approach for your online business model. However, it requires time, effort and expertise to set up and sustain high efficiency and high performance of the Sitecore Solr infrastructure.
The following are the steps to set up solr infrastructure are:
- Create Solr clusters in the cloud
- Set up reporting for tracking and alerting
- Set up the management of log
- Check and test your backup and restore features
- Develop a plan for disaster recovery
Implementing Solr infrastructure for sitecore
Organizations typically have two choices to set up, operate and maintain the Solr infrastructure for Sitecore, assume responsibility personally or use an experienced solution partner.
- In the first choice, the internal development team or implementation contractor can follow a do-it-yourself approach to create and manage the Solr environment. This strategy will take longer and will cost more in the long run if you consider both the direct and indirect costs involved in the design, development and operation of Solr.There are also the potential expenses, since your team will have to spend cycles on projects that are not part of their core skill set instead of focusing on activities that will add more value to your project. You can cut the time it takes by using analytics and process automation, but these moves also require a lot of work initially.
- The other choice is to use the Controlled Sitecore Solr solution from an established software provider who takes full responsibility for developing and maintaining your Solr deployment. A full-service software provider can make suggestions on size and configuration, offer Solr and cloud infrastructure, and provide 24x7x365 support to ensure that the environment is always available.
Why choose managed solr for sitecore?
The following are the reasons to choose the managed solr for sitecore. They are:
- Speed to market is essential
- Focus on developers on value added activities
- Lack Of solr expertise
- Scalability with flexibility for sitecore solr
- Future proofing and extensibility of sitecore solr
- Mission critical sitecore implementation
Sitecore Solr is a technology for indexing. Sitecore supports two search engines, Lucene and Solr, which are used to search the contents and working databases of Sitecore. In order to gain in depth knowledge on the sitecore solr you need to know indexing first.
Indexes and sitecore
Indexes have been a vital feature of Sitecore for as long as we can remember them. In the early days, there was only one choice for indexing technology – Lucena. As Sitecore became more complex, Lucene began to present some problems and as a result of later revisions to Sitecore 6, it became possible to use Sitecore Solr as an alternative.
Solr support is a key feature of Sitecore. If implemented properly and then used, it will allow your application to grow quickly while helping to ensure lightning-fast load times for your pages. To understand why, you need to know a little bit about the differences between Lucena and Solr.
Lucene sitecore vs Sitecore Solr
- The most noticeable distinction between Lucena and Solr is the position of the indexes.
- Lucene indexes exist on each server that needs to be read from the index, while Solr operates on its own machines and all servers share a single copy of the index.
- As Sitecore has grown, its architecture has meant that it is operating on more and more servers, with each server being more customised to suit its purpose.
- Sitecore supports both the search engines Lucene and Solr. Search engines are used to search content databases, as well as to search a variety of running databases that Sitecore uses to gather analytics data, test data, and so on.
- Solr facilitates HTTP(S) calls, which ensures that indexes are accessible to all servers in the environment that need them.
- Lucene is a file-based indexing system, which means that if an index is not stored on the server, the request must be made to ensure that indexes are kept in line with all servers. This is theoretically feasible, but it is non-trivial and not supported.
How to configure sitecore Solr?
One of the key benefits of Sitecore is just how versatile it is if it gets to customization. If you glance at some CMS comparisons, Sitecore is ahead of its competitors in this regard because businesses can run it on a single server or on multiple servers around the globe. It can be deployed on internal networks, on virtual machines or on PaaS components in the cloud.
Sitecore Solr is just as versatile. The suggestion is to make Solr run on multiple servers. This is because it is vital to the website, and so if it is to run on a single server, it poses an unreasonable danger, a single point of failure. We suggest running Solr on multiple servers.It comes with various leveling options and can be used in combination with a technology called Zoo-keeper that maintains consistency across all Solr servers, in a cluster.
Conclusion:
Solr search engine is efficient for text searching/analyzing due to its reversed optimization method. Solr is reliable and well defined. If the client requires the kind of comprehensive text search which Solr provides, then Solr is the right option for you. There’s many hundreds of large corporations (such as AT&T, Netflix, Verizon, and Qualcomm) that use Solr as their predominant search engine. Even Amazon Cloud Search, which is an AWS search engine application, uses Solr internally.