On 22/03/2018 13:13, Steven White wrote:
Hi everyone,
There are some good write ups on the internet comparing the two and the one
thing that keeps coming up about Elasticsearch being superior to Solr is
it's analytic capability. However, I cannot find what those analytic
capabilities are and why they cannot be done using Solr. Can someone help
me with this question?
Hi Steve,
As you've said there are lots of writeups, some more out-of-date than
others. http://solr-vs-elasticsearch.com/ is quite good on features.
The analytics in ES are based on a number of custom aggregations (which
I always think of as facet-counting-on-steroids, but I realise it's more
complicated than that). Here's an early doc on them
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/_analytics.html
So you need a good grasp of Elasticsearch's DSL to use these. The
integration with Kibana is good if you want to display your results.
Solr's analytic capabilities use a Solr Search Component:
https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/7_2/analytics.html . As with a lot
of Solr features these can appear a lot more complex than
Elasticsearch's offering. Yonik's blog is also worth reading as he often
talks about new and upcoming Solr features like this.
http://yonik.com/solr-facet-functions/
As we've always said, there are few cases where you can't build a
solution using either engine and I believe that's also true for analytics.
Personally, I'm a Solr user and the thing that concerns me about
Elasticsearch is the fact that it is owned by a company that can any day
decide to stop making Elasticsearch avaialble under Apache license and even
completely close free access to it.
Yes, but why would they? It would be suicide for a company that have
such an established open source heritage - not least because a lot of
Lucene developers who work for Elastic would object. I'd be a bit more
annoyed about the fact they announced that their commercial XPack
add-ons would be 'open code' and everyone thinks that means 'open
source' - which it clearly isn't.
So, this is a 2 part question:
1) What are the analytic capability of Elasticsearch that cannot be done
using Solr? I want to see a complete list if possible.
2) Should an Elasticsearch user be worried that Elasticsearch may close
it's open-source policy at anytime or that outsiders have no say about it's
road map?
That's a slightly different question about road map - but you do have
some say, Elastic's developers have always been very helpful and open to
suggestions from outsiders (who are also users of course!).
Cheers
Charlie
Thanks,
Steve
--
Charlie Hull
Flax - Open Source Enterprise Search
tel/fax: +44 (0)8700 118334
mobile: +44 (0)7767 825828
web: www.flax.co.uk
