The Elastic London User Group Meetup this week was slightly unusual in that the talks focussed not so much on Elasticsearch but rather on how to scale the systems around it using other technologies. First up was Paul Stack with an amusing description of how he had worked on scaling the logging infrastructure for a major restaurant booking website, to cope with hundreds ...Continue reading
Google's GoogleCode service is closing down, in case you hadn't heard, and I've just started the process of moving everything over to our Github account. This prompted me to take a look at what's there and there's a surprising amount of open source code I'd forgotten about. So, here's a quick rundown of the useful tools, examples...Continue reading
I've always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian ...Continue reading
Last week I dropped in on the IntraTeam 2015 conference in Copenhagen, an event focused on intranets with some content on enterprise search. After a rather pleasant evening of Thai food and networking I attended the last day of the event. The keynote speaker was Dave Snowden, who has an amusing and rather curmudgeonly style of presentation, making sure to note the previous presenters he'd disagreed with for their over-reliance on simplistic concepts of k...Continue reading
Stephen Arnold, whose blog I enjoy due to its unabashed cynicism about overenthusiastic marketing of search technology, was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent report on CyberOSINT & Next Generation Information Access (NGIA), the latter being a term he has recently coined. OSINT itself refers to intelligence gathered from open, publically available sources, not anything to do with software license...Continue reading
We had another London user group Meetup last week, hosted by Reed.co.uk who also provided some tasty pizza - eaten under the 'Love Mondays' sign from their adverts, which now lives in their boardroom! A few new faces this time and a couple of great talks from two companies who have incorporated Solr into their platforms. First up was Andy Hind<...Continue reading
I spent a day last week at a new event from UNICOM, a conference on Real-Time Analytics. Mike Ferguson chaired the event and was kind enough to spend time with me over lunch exploring how search software might fit into the mix, something that has been on my mind since hearing about the Unified Log<...Continue reading
After a long day at a Real Time Analytics event (of which more later) I dropped into the Elasticsearch London User Group, hosted by Red Badger and provided with a ridiculously huge amount of pizza (I have a theory that you'll be able to spot an Elasticsearch developer in a few years by the size of their pizza-filled belly). ...Continue reading
We're speaking at a couple of events soon: if you're in London and interested in Apache Lucene/Solr we're also planning another London User Group Meetup soon. Firstly my colleague Alan Woodward is speaking with Martin Kleppman at FOSDEM in Brussels (31st January-1st February) on Continue reading
As part of our BioSolr project, we've been discussing how best to create a federated search over several Apache Solr instances. In this case various research institutions across the world are annotating data objects representing proteins and it would b...Continue reading
