Oracle, Sun Burned, and Solr Exposure
July 19, 2011
Frankly we wondered when Oracle would move off the dime in faceted search. “Faceted search”, in my lingo, is showing users categories. You can fancy up the explanation, but a person looking for a subject may hit a dead end. The “facet” angle displays links to possibly related content. If you want to educate me, use the comments section for this blog, please.
We are always looking for a solution to our clients’ Oracle “findability” woes. It’s not just relevance. Think performance. Query and snack is the operative mode for at least one of our technical baby geese. Well, Oracle is a bit of a red herring. The company is not looking for a solution to SES11g functionality. Lucid Imagination, a company offering enterprise grade enterprise search solutions, is.
The question is a compelling one: “Need a better way to perform targeted searches of an enterprise database?” Lucid Imagination suggests a solution in “Solr Searching with RDBMS.”
Writer Altan Khendup observes that pattern searches within a range of criteria are often addressed with standardized reports or custom-written relational queries. These tools, however, can be inadequate and high-maintenance. He suggests using the open-source application Solr, instead.
Khendup describes a job he performed for a large company which had an existing customer relationship management (CRM) application. Users had no efficient to pull specific information from the large database. Solr provided the key to bypass the complex solution that would otherwise have been required. Check out the article for details.
Khendup concludes:
“With these new capabilities, answers to key questions can be found in seconds. Data can be mined quickly, efficiently and flexibly without a lot of specialized training for business users. Additionally, the indexes could be managed in such a way such that additional data could be added for to increase the scope of analysis, or subsets of data could be indexed and searched for specific business reasons such as service outages or legal reasons.”
We wonder, will the Oracle SES team embrace or resist this option? Right now, not likely. Going forward, * if * the open source litigation arena smiles on Dolphin Way, maybe.
Cynthia Murrell July 19, 2011
Sponsored by—believe it or not—Quasar Capital Advisors, a next generation financial services and analytics firm. Check the company out: www.quasarca.com.
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2 Responses to “Oracle, Sun Burned, and Solr Exposure”
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I would describe faceting differently than “hitting a dead end and showing related content” (maybe that’s use of synonyms for search terms) I would describe facets as a way of integrating structured data into the search paradigm. A facet shows the possible values for a field or category and the count of resources that have that value. Selecting a facet allows you to filter results by the value selected, in addition to whatever query terms you have specified.
It is a discovery feature in addition to a search feature, because you can typically see facets before you enter a full text search term and can use them to browse the data.
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