Developing Search Applications With Solr is a 3-day instructor-led, hands-on classroom training course designed and developed by the engineers that helped write the Lucene/Solr code, and delivered by instructors certified by Lucid in a shared classroom setting. The objective of this course is to provide you with the in-depth information to implement Solr search engine technologies. Through a combination of lectures, hands-on lab exercises and example tutorials you will learn to apply best practices to develop scalable, high availability and high performance search applications. There will be time for questions and discussion to enhance your learning experience. At the end of the course you will understand how to set up and use Solr to index and search, how to analyse and solve common problems, and how to use optional Solr modules such as facets, spell check, and highlighting.

Day 1

• Principles of Search
• Sample search applications and use cases
• Solr Terminology
• Key terms and definitions
• A first look at Solr Search
• Request handlers and response writers; sample searhers, Solr's Admin application, survey of what happens in a running Slor application, and also a look at the VelocityResponseWriter to see an example of one of the many ways that Solr can return results.
• Solr Features Overview
• Main Solr features and characteristics
• Going Further with Solr Search
• An overview of search parameters, Solr query syntax, filter and range queries, result sets
• Executing searches using the SolrJ API to query the Solr server from within a Java application
• Dismax Query Parser
• Lucene as the Underlying Search Library
• Lucene internals, Nutch and Mahoot, the Luke utility:understanding the internals of a Lucene index
• Basic Solr Architecture
• Details of the file system structure of the Solr home directory, update handlers, admin console, and replication
• Designing Solr Applications
• Project definition, data model, data sources, application requirements, designing Solr schema, and using qualifi ers to create controlled entry points for searching
• Solr Configuration
• Using Solr config files and schema.xml files, how to use the admin console's Schema Browser Tool

Day 2

• Introduction to Analysis
• Solr's analysis process and how to use analysers and token filters; use of the admin analysis tool to see how the analysis stack created to tokenize content affects a query
• Findability: How configuration files and decisions will impact the findability and relevancy of your search results; filters used in the analysis stack and the direct impact on relevance of search results.
• Understanding Relevance
• Determining relevance quality, using scoring models, payloads,and debugging relevance issues
• How to use a query-time field boost to Improve relevance
• Findability and Domain Knowledge
• How to plan and implement for best findability
• Compare text and string field types for facets: designing a field for faceting to provide a way to navigate the index
• Building a query filter: adding a query filter that will only return Word documents as results
• Using and configuring synonyms to improve findability
• Solr Indexing
• Indexing document files into the Solr index; how Solr XML documents are POSTed to Solr, and the details of the XML structure
• Batch Indexing - using a simple command-line indexing application
• Using Solr's Data Import Handler
• Use of the DataImportHandler as a workflow engine for fetching and indexing data, applying the Data Import Handler it to import an RSS feed into an index

Day 3

• Faceted Searching with Solr
• Faceted Search - how to implement faceting in Solr, using SolrJ
• Planning for Faceting - evaluating your domain-specific needs for faceted search; configuring index fields in schema.xml so they are available for faceted searches
• Other Search Features and Solr Contrib
• Enable and configure highlighting, processing highlighted fragments that are returned
• Query elevation and boosting
• Clustering content dynamically to organize collections of documents into thematic categories
• Build a Spell Checking Index, adding fields and field type to the schema to use the SpellCheckComponent.
• Introduction to Solr Administration and Operations
• Index maintenance and back-up
• Replication, monitoring, and scaling Solr
• Using JConsole to monitor the JVM for a running indexing job and the Solr server
• Troubleshooting Your Search Application
• Diagnosing and fixing common problems, performance and user search result issues
• Open Source Community How it works, how to participate, and how to leverage resources