What if I don’t want to use Elasticsearch?

Wolf
9 min readFeb 7

There are in the market some alternatives to Elasticsearch that can be a good fit depending on the use case.

Let’s look at some options together with example use cases and differences.

Apache Solr

Apache Solr is open-source, highly scalable full-text search and analytics engine. It has a large community of users and developers and is built on top of Apache Lucene. Offers automatic load balancing, distributed reindexing, failover, recovery queries and all of Lucene’s search capabilities through HTTP requests.

Example uses cases where Apache Solr can be a good fit:

  • E-commerce Search: Can be used to provide fast and relevant search results for e-commerce websites, with features like autocomplete, faceted search, and spell correction.
  • Content Search: Can be used to search and index large collections of text-based content, such as articles, blog posts, and product descriptions.
  • Enterprise Search: Can be used as an internal search engine for large organizations, with features like access controls, document classification, and query suggestions.
  • Geospatial Search: Solr has built-in support for geospatial search, making it a good choice for use cases that require searching based on location, such as real estate or travel websites.
  • Big Data Analytics: Can be used as a part of a big data analytics stack, with features like real-time indexing, faceted search, and advanced analytics capabilities.
  • Business Intelligence: Can be used to provide fast and flexible search-based access to business intelligence data, with features like faceted search, real-time analytics, and customizable dashboards.

Overall, Solr is a versatile search engine that can handle a wide range of use cases, from simple search applications to complex, large-scale data processing tasks.

Example of a data model for products in Apache Solr:

<doc>
<field name="id">12345</field>
<field name="product_name">iPhone 12 Pro Max</field>
<field name="description">IPhone with a 6.7-inch display.</field>
<field name="price">1299.99</field>
<field name="category">Electronics</field>…
Wolf

A software engineer looking for learning more and share my knowledge.