Apache Kafka London Meetup – Real time search and insights

The rise of Apache Kafka as a streaming data solution is something we've been watching for a while - as part of a collection of Big Data tools, it provides a 'TiVo for data' feature. We've begun to use it in client projects covering both search and log analysis...Continue reading

Flax wins contract with NHS Wales to support Apache Solr for Welsh Clinical Portal

We're very pleased to announce that Flax has won a 3-year contract with the NHS Wales Informatics Service to support the Apache Lucene/Solr search engine used by the Welsh Clinical Portal, during which period we'll be backing up the in-house team with our deep experience of Solr. The Welsh Clinical Portal is a classic example of how a search engine ...Continue reading

Flax announces partnership with Apache Kafka creators Confluent

We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...Continue reading

Elasticsearch London Meetup – Exploring the Graph API & SearchKit UI components

This month's Elasticsearch Meetup was hosted by Argos at their Victoria Digital Hub with a relatively small crowd this time - I suspect quite a few who registered didn't actually turn up or release their tickets, which is a shame as there was a waiting list. Mark Harwood of Elastic was first with a talk about the new Graph API and visua...Continue reading

Choosing between Elasticsearch and Solr

One of the questions we're asked all the time is which of the two most popular open source search engines is best for a particular use case - and the answer is always 'it depends'. Broadly speaking, Apache Lucene/Solr and Elasticsearch are very similar in terms of features and performance. If you've already chosen one of them, there's very few reasons to incur the inevitable extra work of switching to the other. However if you're still not sure which to choose, read on. Solr,...Continue reading