Highlights of Search, Store, Scale & Stream – Berlin Buzzwords 2018

I spent last week in a sunny Berlin for the Berlin Buzzwords event (and subsequently MICES 2018, of which more later). This was my first visit to Buzzwords which was held in an arts & culture complex in an old brewery north of the city centre. The event was larger than I was expecting at around 550 people with three main tracks of talks. Although due to so...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

Unified Log Meetup – Scaling up with Skyscanner, Samza and Samsara

Last night I dropped in on the Unified Log Meetup at JustEat's offices (of course, they provided lots of pizza for us all!). I've written about this Meetup before - as a rule the events cover logging and analytics at massive scale, with search being only part of the picture. Joseph Francis from Continue reading

Convergence and collisions in Enterprise Search

At the end of next month I'll be at Enterprise Search Europe (I'm on the programme committee and help with the open source track) and the opening keynote this year is from Dale Roberts, author of the book Decision Sourcing. Dale will be talking about how Social, Big Data, Analytics and Enterprise Search are on a ...Continue reading