Looking to integrate Solr with NoSQL? Answers arrive South by Southwest

For all of you who didn’t make it to Austin/SXSW for this year’s Trendsetting  in Texas, I heartily recommend the new podcast of the session featuring RC Johnson of BazaarVoice and our own Grant Ingersoll on taking a search’s-eye view of the big data technology cloud (Hadoop, Cassandra, Mongo, how many of them are there?).

Solr Power FTW: Make NoSQL Your Bitch!: Learn how Solr can be used as a Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database along the lines of Cassandra, Memcached, and Redis. NoSQL data stores are regularly described as non-relational, distributed, internet-scalable and are used at both Facebook and Digg. This presentation will quickly cover the fundamentals of NoSQL data stores, the basics of Lucene, and what Solr brings to the table. Following that we will dive into the technical details of making Solr your primary query engine on large scale web applications, thus relegating your traditional relational database to little more than a simple key store. Real solutions to problems like handling four billion requests per month will be presented. We’ll talk about sizing and configuring the Solr instances to maintain rapid response times under heavy load. We’ll show you how to change the schema on a live system with tens of millions of documents indexed while supporting real-time results. And finally, we’ll answer your questions about ways to work around the lack of transactions in Solr and how you can do all of this in a highly available solution.

Don’t get distracted by the cheesy session title (anyone ever lose our underestimating public taste?).  This is a really substantive discussion of an up-to-date, relevant topic.