Querying Rich Text with XQuery

Solr and Lucene provide a powerful, scalable search server. XQuery provides a rich querying and programming model for use with marked-up text. The session, “Querying Rich Text with XQuery,” by Michael Sokolov, Senior Architect at Safari Books Online, will present Lux, a system that combines these into a powerful XML search engine, which is freely available under an open-source license. Query optimizers often mystify database users: sometimes queries run quickly and sometimes they don’t. An intuitive grasp of what will work well in an optimizer is often gained only after trial, error, inductive logic (i.e., educated guessing), and sometimes propitiatory sacrifice.

This session will explain some of the mystery by describing work on Lux’s optimizer. Lux optimizes queries by rewriting them as equivalent (but usually faster) indexed queries, so its results are easier for a user to understand than the abstract query plans produced by some optimizers. Lucene-based QName and path indexes prove useful in speeding up XQuery execution by Saxon. Finally, this session will describe the mechanisms Lux uses for extending Solr and Lucene, which include Solr UpdateProcessor, ResponseWriter, and QueryComponent plugins, dynamic Solr schema enhancement, custom XML-aware analyzers and tokenizers.

This advanced level session will take place from 3:40-4:25 on Wednesday, November 6. Click here for more details.

About the Speaker:

Michael Sokolov (@msokolov) has spent the last 14 years developing complex search-driven online texts, including oed.com, oxfordscholarship.com, degruyter.com, among many, previously at iFactory, now as a part of Safari Books. He designed and implemented both the core search API and the data processing framework for the PubFactory platform, and championed its adoption of Solr/Lucene. Recently he has been working on building recommendations for Safari Books, and for the last year or so he has been building Lux, the XML search engine that provides an XML search capability as a plugin to Solr, which is available at luxdb.org under an open source license.

More Details:

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Lucene/Solr Revolution is presented by Lucidworks, the commercial entity for Apache Lucene/Solr open source search — the future of search technology.