Apache Lucene equivalent in Elixir

Questions / Help
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Hi all,

I need to index patents from the sources available in the web. The current implementation enables querying over a database of patents published by the USPTO.

Current implementation: Apache Nutch, Apache Lucene and PostgreSQL.

Is there a Apache Lucene equivalent in Elixir?

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I’m not experienced enough with Elixir to comment on a direct equivalent of Lucene, but perhaps swapping out Lucene with Solr might do the trick.

Then you might be able to use an Elixir-based client, maybe:

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Is it a project requirement for the full-text index to be embedded, or it is a possibility to use a search server like ElasticSearch or Solr (both based on Lucene internally)? In that case there are Elixir clients available.

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It really wouldn’t be hard to set up your own Lucene server, then query it from Elixir. Full-text index & search is very CPU intensive–I’d call it a good example of something the BEAM is not suited for.

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As @lucaong suggested, Solr and ElasticSearch are nice services based on Lucene, gotta see what is better for you. I use Elastic, but instead of a client package to interact with it, I use just a module that provides a minimal API to talk to it.

Definitely not a recommendation, but yes, there is at least one:

riak_search is a Lucene-like full-text search engine in the BEAM (Erlang), it just seems not to be under active development anymore – not sure if others are still working with it. Looks like it provides full text abilities just with BEAM, and also integration with Solr.

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It is not a requirement of the project. ElasticSearch and Solr are interesting options.

Good idea! I will try this approach. :smile:

Thank you so much!

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There is a rust alternative called tantivy which is not particularly hard to interact with from elixir via rustler.

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There is Amazon rip off of elastic search also :slight_smile:


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nice Rust is cool kid on the block :slight_smile:

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And don’t forget, if you’re using Postgres as the database the full text search capabilities are quite good and can often prevent the need to involve an external engine.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/textsearch.html

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if you’re looking to integrate with elastic search there’s https://github.com/tsloughter/erlastic_search - take a look at the .travis.yml if you’d like to set up a similar integration test (i’m a maintainer on that project)

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