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

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

The four types of open source search project

As I'm currently writing content for our new Flax website (which is taking far longer than anticipated for various reasons I won't bore you with) I've been thinking about the sort of projects we encounter at Flax. You might find this useful if you're planning or starting a search project with Solr or Elasticsearch. Note that not everything we do fits cleanly into these four categories! Continue reading

Flax partners with open source support specialists Sirius Corporation

We're very happy to announce we've partnered with Sirius Corporation. Sirius are the leading U.K. provider of managed services, support and training for open source software with an impressive and growing list of clients including Canonical, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Met Office. We've recently carried out a major project for which Sir...Continue reading