Solr as an Analytics Platform by Chris Becker.
From the post:
Here at Shutterstock we love digging into data. We collect large amounts of it, and want a simple, fast way to access it. One of the tools we use to do this is Apache Solr.
Most users of Solr will know it for its power as a full-text search engine. Its text analyzers, sorting, filtering, and faceting components provide an ample toolset for many search applications. A single instance can scale to hundreds of millions of documents (depending on your hardware), and it can scale even further through sharding. Modern web search applications also need to be fast, and Solr can deliver in this area as well.
The needs of a data analytics platform aren’t much different. It too requires a platform that can scale to support large volumes of data. It requires speed, and depends heavily on a system that can scale horizontally through sharding as well. And some of the main operations of data analytics – counting, slicing, and grouping — can be implemented using Solr’s filtering and faceting options.
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A good introduction to obtaining useful results with Solr with a minimum of effort.
Certainly a good way to show ROI when you are convincing your manager to sponsor you for a Solr conference and/or training.