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I'm lost in: Hadoop, Hbase, Lucene, Carrot2, Cloudera, Tika, ZooKeeper, Solr, Katta, Cascading, POI...

When you read about the one you can be often sure that each of the others tools is going to be mentioned.

I don't expect you to explain every tool to me - sure not. If you could help me to narrow this set for my particular scenario it would be great. So far I'm not sure which of the above will fit and it looks like (as always) there are more then one way of doing what's to be done.

The scenario is: 500GB - ~20 TB of documents stored in Hadoop. Text documents in multiple formats: email, doc, pdf, odt. Metadata about those documents stored in SQL db (sender, recipients, date, department etc.) Main source of documents will be ExchangeServer (emails and attachments), but not only. Now to the search: User needs to be able to do complex full-text searches over those documents. Basicaly he'll be presented with some search-config panel (java desktop application, not webapp) - he'll set date range, document types, senders/recipients, keywords etc. - fire the search and get the resulting list of the documents (and for each document info why its included in search results i.e. which keywords are found in document).

Which tools I should take into consideration and which not? The point is to develop such solution with only minimal required "glue"-code. I'm proficient in SQLdbs but quite uncomfortable with Apache-and-related technologies.

Basic workflow looks like this: ExchangeServer/other source -> conversion from doc/pdf/... -> deduplication -> Hadopp + SQL (metadata) -> build/update an index <- search through the docs (and do it fast) -> present search results

Thank you!

garret
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5 Answers5

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Going with solr is a good option. I have used it for similar scenario you described above. You can use solr for real huge data as its a distributed index server.

But to get the meta data about all of these documents formats you should be using some other tool. Basically your workflow will be this.

1) Use hadoop cluster to store data.

2) Extract data in hadoop cluster using map/redcue

3) Do document identification( identify document type)

4) Extract meta data from these document.

5) Index metadata in solr server, store other ingestion information in database

6) Solr server is distributed index server, so for each ingestion you could create a new shard or index.

7) When search is required search on all the indexs.

8) Solr supports all the complex searches , so you don't have to make your own search engine.

9) It also does paging for you as well.

Animesh Raj Jha
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We've done exactly this for some of our clients by using Solr as a "secondary indexer" to HBase. Updates to HBase are sent to Solr, and you can query against it. Typically folks start with HBase, and then graft search on. Sounds like you know from the get go that search is what you want, so you can probably embed the secondary indexing in from your pipeline that feeds HBase.

You may find though that just using Solr does everything you need.

Eric Pugh
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  • Could you pls explain the need of HBase if Solr can do everything with little details? Is it because you started with HBase first or there is more to it? Thanks in adv. – Dexter May 10 '15 at 18:08
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    Dexter, been of SO for a while. Just saw your comment, you are quite right... HBase does give you a tabular data structure, but when it comes it interactively querying, well Solr does an amazing job for that. – Eric Pugh Jul 11 '15 at 19:37
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Another project to look at is Lily, http://www.lilyproject.org/lily/index.html, which has already done the work of integrating Solr with a distributed database.

Also, I do not see why you would not want to use a browser for this application. You are describing exactly what faceted search is. While you certainly could set up a desktop app that communicates with the server (parses JSON) and displays the results in a thick client GUI, all of this work is already done for you in the browser. And, Solr comes with a free faceted search system out of the box: just follow along the tutorial.

David
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As a side note, you can't say the documents are stored in Hadoop, they are stored in a distributed file system (most probably HDFS since you mentioned Hadoop).

Regarding searching/indexing: Lucene is the tool to use for your scenario. You can use it for both indexing and searching. It's a java library. There is also an associated project (called Solr) which allows you to access the indexing/searching system through WebServices. So you should also take a look at Solr as it allows the handling of different types of documents (Lucene puts the responsability of interpreting the document (PDF, Word, etc) on your shoulders but you, probably, can already do that)

Razvan
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Going with Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr) is a good solution, but be ready to have to deal with some non-obvious things. First is planning your indexes properly. Multiple terabytes of data will almost definitely need multiple shards on Solr for any level of reasonable performance and you'll be in charge of managing those yourself. It does provide distributed search (doing the queries off multiple shards), but that is only half the battle.

ElasticSearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/) is another popular alternative, but i don't have much experience with it regarding scale. It uses the same Lucene engine so i'd expect the search feature-set to be similar.

Another type of solution is something like SenseiDB - open sourced from LinkedIn - which gives the full-text search functionality (also Lucene-based) as well as proven scale for large amounts of data:

http://senseidb.com

They've definitely done a lot of work on search over there and my casual use of it is pretty promising.

Assuming all your data is already in Hadoop, you could write some custom MR jobs that pull the data in a consistent schema-friendly format into SenseiDB. SenseiDB already provides a Hadoop MR indexer which you can look at.

The only caveat is it is a little more complex to setup, but will save you with the scaling issues many times over - especially around indexing performance and faceting functionality. It also provides clustering support if HA is important to you - which is still in Alpha for Solr (Solr 4.x is alpha atm).

Hope that helps and good luck!

Update:

I asked a friend who is more versed in ElasticSearch than me and it does have the advantage of clustering and rebalancing based on the # of machines and shards you have. This is a definite win over Solr - especially if you're dealing with TBs of data. The only downside is the current state of documentation on ElasticSearch leaves a lot to be desired.

Matan
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