Solr vs. Elasticsearch – Case by Case by Alexandre Rafalovitch.
From the description:
A presentation given at the Lucene/Solr Revolution 2014 conference to show Solr and Elasticsearch features side by side. The presentation time was only 30 minutes, so only the core usability features were compared. The full video is coming later.
Just the highlights and those from an admitted ElasticSearch user.
One very telling piece of advice for Solr:
Solr – needs to buckle down and focus on the onboarding experience
Solr is getting better (e.g. listen to SolrCluster podcast of October 24, 2014)
Just in case you don’t know the term: onboarding.
And SolrCluster podcast of October 24, 2014: Solr Usability with Steve Rowe & Tim Potter
From the description:
In this episode, Lucene/Solr Committers Steve Rowe and Tim Potter join the SolrCluster team to discuss how Lucidworks and the community are making changes and improvements to Solr to increase usability and add ease to the getting started experience. Steve and Tim discuss new features such as data-driven schema, start-up scripts, launching SolrCloud, and more. (length 33:29)
Paraphrasing:
…focusing on the first five minutes of the Solr experience…hard to explore if you can’t get it started…can be a little bit scary at first…has lacked a focus on accessibility by ordinary users…need usability addressed throughout the lifecycle of the product…want to improve kicking the tires on Solr…lowering mental barriers for new users…do now have start scripts…bakes in a lot of best practices…scripts for SolrCloud…hide all the weird stuff…data driven schemas…throw data at Solr and it creates an index without creating a schema…working on improving tutorials and documentation…moving towards consolidating information…will include use cases…walk throughs…will point to different data sets…making it easier to query Solr and understand the query URLs…bringing full collections API support to the admin UI…Rest interface…components report possible configuration…plus a form to interact with it directly…forms that render in the browser…will have a continued focus on usability…not a one time push…new users need to submit any problems they encounter….
Great podcast!
Very encouraging on issues of documentation and accessibility in Solr.