This is a full text search question.
I was using Elasticsearch for my logging system. And now I heard that MongoDB also supports full text search and tested the performance.
I made a text index and tested it.
With 10,000 words, 10 million documents were created.
And it looked up two words. (ex. "apple pineapple")
The results were surprising. MongoDB searches were faster.
Am I misunderstanding full text search in Elasticsearch?? did i do the test wrong?
In terms of full text search performance, is there no reason why Elasticsearch should be used?
Am I misunderstanding full text search??
Please teach me.
If your use case is full text search only, I will still be more inclined towards Elasticsearch as it is designed for the same. I admit however that I haven't explored Mongodb capabilities in this regard. Elasticsearch provides various search paths fuzzy, proximity matches, match phrases and more which can be used depending on your use case.
One another difference between Elastic and Mongo's data storage is that Elastic keeps everything in memory while Mongo balances between disk and memory. So ideally Elastic should be faster if you load test it.
In terms of your test, please make sure that both mongo and elastic clusters are of equivalent strength in terms of resources. Else it is not apple to apple comparison.
I am using Apache Solr 6.3.0 and MongoDB 3.4 for advance text search features. I have successfully, synced mongodb with solr cores using mongo-connector 2.5 and solr doc manager.
I want to know the right way and practices to use solr with mongo and I have some issues that I need help on:
1). Now that my data is available both in mongo database and also indexed and stored in Solr cores, should I now query Solr all the time ? Or should I query solr for text search only and perform rest of the queries on mongo ?
2). Is there some way I could perform powerful search directly on mongo database using the indexing done by Solr ?
3). I have some collections that contain deeply nested json data and MongoDb supports them well. Solr indexes and stores such data in flattened form.But, I want to maintain the original nested json format in query response. Is this something I can achieve with Solr ?
Other suggestions about good practices of using solr with mongoDb will be extremely helpful.
If it makes sense to just query Solr, do that. If it makes sense to query Solr for certain data, do that. It depends on your use case, but if any query can be answered with the data in Solr, it's perfectly fine to use that for everything. That'll probably allow a more efficient use of your caches.
No, not that I know of.
Not really. Solr isn't well suited for nested JSON (even if you have parent/child documents, it's something you'll have to manually handle in every situation and will require special casing all over).
In those situations you can use Solr for querying, get the ids back and then retrieve the actual documents from mongo with their JSON structure intact. In that case you can leave most fields as non-stored in Solr.
In my project I have to implement text search and and have to choose a feasible
approach among the two that are :-
Synchronising MongoDB database with ElasticSearch.
MongoDB's own text indexes that has Elastic Search like text searching
capabilities.
I have gone through many articles that provide the pros of each of the cases but haven't found any relevant document that provides comparison between the two approaches and which approach is better than the other or what are the limitation for a specific approach.
Note:- I am using Node.js with express.js.
MongoDB is a general purpose database, Elasticsearch is a distributed text search engine backed by Lucene. You can store data in MongoDB and use Elasticsearch exclusively for its' full-text search capabilities. According to your use case, you can only send a subset of the mongo data fields to elastic.
Synchronization of mongodb with Elasticsearch can be done with mongoosastic. You can solve data safety concern by persisting in mongo and speed up your search by using elasticsearch. Also can use python script using elasticsearch.py package to sync mongo and elasticsearch.
Mongodb search is very slow as compared to elasticsearch. Also indexing in mongodb takes up more time and more resources.
I am beginner with mongodb and its integraiton with Solr. From different posts I got an idea about the integration steps. But need info on the below
I have the data in mongodb, for faster retrieval we are integrating it with Solr.
Solr indexes all mongodb entries. Is this indexing one time activity after integration or Do we need to periodically update Solr to index the entries which got inserted after the integration ?
If we need to periodically update solr, it becomes an extra overhead to maintain it in Solr as well along with mongodb. Best approaches on overcoming it.
As far as I know you do not have official(supported/complete) solution to integrate MongoDB and Solr, but let me give you some ideas/direction.
For me the best approach is when it is possible to modify the application and add to the persistence layer the fact that you have all writes operations done in MongoDB and Solr in the "same" time. Like that you can control exactly what you want to send to the Database and what you want to index for a full text operation. But as I said this means that you have to change your application code. (You will have anyway to change it to be able to query Solr when needed). And yes you have to index all the existing documents the first time
You can use a "connector" approach where MongoDB and Solr are kind of connected together, this could be done in various ways.
You can use for example the MongoDB Connector available here : https://github.com/10gen-labs/mongo-connector
LucidWorks, the company behind Solr has also a connector for MongoDB, documented here : http://docs.lucidworks.com/display/help/Create+a+New+MongoDB+Data+Source# (I have not used it so cannot comment, but it is also an approach)
You point #2 is true, you have to manage two clusters and be sure the data are in sync, and sometimes pay the price of inconsistency between the Solr index and the document just updated in MongoDB... So you need to see if the best approach for your application is to use MongoDB alone or MongoDB with Solr (see comment below)
Just a small comment in addition to this answer:
You are talking about "faster retrieval", not sure it should be the reason, if you write correct queries with correct indexes in MongoDB you should be able to do it without Solr. If you requirement is really oriented towards the power of solr meaning: full text index (with all related features it makes sense)
How large is your data? MongoDB has a few good indexing mechanism of its own.
There is a powerful geo-api and for full text search there is http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/index-text/. So it would be ideal to identify if your need fits into MongoDB or you need to spill over to SOLR.
About the indexing part. How often if your data updated? If you can afford to have infrequent updates, then a batch job with once a day re-indexing may work for you. Ideally SOLR would work well for some form of master data.
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With the NoSQL movement growing based on document-based databases, I've looked at MongoDB lately. I have noticed a striking similarity with how to treat items as "Documents", just like Lucene does (and users of Solr).
So, the question: Why would you want to use NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc) over Lucene (or Solr) as your "database"?
What I am (and I am sure others are) looking for in an answer is some deep-dive comparisons of them. Let's skip over relational database discussions all together, as they serve a different purpose.
Lucene gives some serious advantages, such as powerful searching and weight systems. Not to mention facets in Solr (which Solr is being integrated into Lucene soon, yay!). You can use Lucene documents to store IDs, and access the documents as such just like MongoDB. Mix it with Solr, and you now get a WebService-based, load balanced solution.
You can even throw in a comparison of out-of-proc cache providers such as Velocity or MemCached when talking about similar data storing and scalability of MongoDB.
The restrictions around MongoDB reminds me of using MemCached, but I can use Microsoft's Velocity and have more grouping and list collection power over MongoDB (I think). Can't get any faster or scalable than caching data in memory. Even Lucene has a memory provider.
MongoDB (and others) do have some advantages, such as the ease of use of their API. New up a document, create an id, and store it. Done. Nice and easy.
This is a great question, something I have pondered over quite a bit. I will summarize my lessons learned:
You can easily use Lucene/Solr in lieu of MongoDB for pretty much all situations, but not vice versa. Grant Ingersoll's post sums it up here.
MongoDB etc. seem to serve a purpose where there is no requirement of searching and/or faceting. It appears to be a simpler and arguably easier transition for programmers detoxing from the RDBMS world. Unless one's used to it Lucene & Solr have a steeper learning curve.
There aren't many examples of using Lucene/Solr as a datastore, but Guardian has made some headway and summarize this in an excellent slide-deck, but they too are non-committal on totally jumping on Solr bandwagon and "investigating" combining Solr with CouchDB.
Finally, I will offer our experience, unfortunately cannot reveal much about the business-case. We work on the scale of several TB of data, a near real-time application. After investigating various combinations, decided to stick with Solr. No regrets thus far (6-months & counting) and see no reason to switch to some other.
Summary: if you do not have a search requirement, Mongo offers a simple & powerful approach. However if search is key to your offering, you are likely better off sticking to one tech (Solr/Lucene) and optimizing the heck out of it - fewer moving parts.
My 2 cents, hope that helped.
You can't partially update a document in solr. You have to re-post all of the fields in order to update a document.
And performance matters. If you do not commit, your change to solr does not take effect, if you commit every time, performance suffers.
There is no transaction in solr.
As solr has these disadvantages, some times NoSQL is a better choice.
UPDATE: Solr 4+ Started supporting commit and soft-commits. Refer to the latest document https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/8_5/
We use MongoDB and Solr together and they perform well. You can find my blog post here where i described how we use this technologies together. Here's an excerpt:
[...] However we observe that query performance of Solr decreases when index
size increases. We realized that the best solution is to use both Solr
and Mongo DB together. Then, we integrate Solr with MongoDB by storing
contents into the MongoDB and creating index using Solr for full-text
search. We only store the unique id for each document in Solr index
and retrieve actual content from MongoDB after searching on Solr.
Getting documents from MongoDB is faster than Solr because there is no
analyzers, scoring etc. [...]
Also please note that some people have integrated Solr/Lucene into Mongo by having all indexes be stored in Solr and also monitoring oplog operations and cascading relevant updates into Solr.
With this hybrid approach you can really have the best of both worlds with capabilities such as full text search and fast reads with a reliable datastore that can also have blazing write speed.
It's a bit technical to setup but there are lots of oplog tailers that can integrate into solr. Check out what rangespan did in this article.
http://denormalised.com/home/mongodb-pub-sub-using-the-replication-oplog.html
From my experience with both, Mongo is great for simple, straight-forward usage. The main Mongo disadvantage we've suffered is the poor performance on unanticipated queries (you cannot created mongo indexes for all the possible filter/sort combinations, you simple can't).
And here where Lucene/Solr prevails big time, especially with the FilterQuery caching, Performance is outstanding.
Since no one else mentioned it, let me add that MongoDB is schema-less, whereas Solr enforces a schema. So, if the fields of your documents are likely to change, that's one reason to choose MongoDB over Solr.
#mauricio-scheffer mentioned Solr 4 - for those interested in that, LucidWorks is describing Solr 4 as "the NoSQL Search Server" and there's a video at http://www.lucidworks.com/webinar-solr-4-the-nosql-search-server/ where they go into detail on the NoSQL(ish) features. (The -ish is for their version of schemaless actually being a dynamic schema.)
If you just want to store data using key-value format, Lucene is not recommended because its inverted index will waste too much disk spaces. And with the data saving in disk, its performance is much slower than NoSQL databases such as redis because redis save data in RAM. The most advantage for Lucene is it supports much of queries, so fuzzy queries can be supported.
MongoDB Atlas will have a lucene-based search engine soon. The big announcement was made at this week's MongoDB World 2019 conference. This is a great way to encourage more usage of their high revenue MongoDB Atlas product.
I was hoping to see it rolled into the MongoDB Enterprise version 4.2 but there's been no news of bringing it to their on-prem product line.
More info here: https://www.mongodb.com/atlas/full-text-search
The third party solutions, like a mongo op-log tail are attractive. Some thoughts or questions remain about whether the solutions could be tightly integrated, assuming a development/architecture perspective. I don't expect to see a tightly integrated solution for these features for a few reasons (somewhat speculative and subject to clarification and not up to date with development efforts):
mongo is c++, lucene/solr are java
maybe lucene could use some mongo libs
maybe mongo could rewrite some lucene algorithms, see also:
http://clucene.sourceforge.net/
http://lucy.apache.org/
lucene supports various doc formats
mongo is focused on JSON (BSON)
lucene uses immutable documents
single field updates are an issue, if they are available
lucene indexes are immutable with complex merge ops
mongo queries are javascript
mongo has no text analyzers / tokenizers (AFAIK)
mongo doc sizes are limited, that might go against the grain for lucene
mongo aggregation ops may have no place in lucene
lucene has options to store fields across docs, but that's not the same thing
solr somehow provides aggregation/stats and SQL/graph queries