I have a rails app which has data in MySQL db. I am using Sunspot to interact with Solr and I would like to be able to use DataImportHandler to import data from MySQL to Solr. I have tried searching on google and I can't seem to find an answer to my question.
Ultimately, I want to be able to create a rake task that will do this data import.
The idea is interesting, but the answer is no. You would have to create your own custom data-config.xml. That said, so long as you stick to Sunspot field naming conventions, you should still be able to use Sunspot for searching with such a setup.
Generation of that data-config.xml from Sunspot's configuration would definitely be an interesting addition. Maybe for a future version.
Related
I need to run a long query over Solr but Sunspot is using GET as the default method. I know that this is something supported on RSolr, but i don't know if i can do it through Susnpot.
Thanks!
According to the Sunspot source on GitHub, Sunspot already uses POST as the default for submitting queries to Solr when searching. This was changed in 2011, so if you have a VERY old version of Sunspot, that might be an issue.
Otherwise if you're still seeing GETs on the server side, it'd be helpful to see the code you're actually using for searching.
I've added sunspot gem in my application and tried to send it to production in heroku, but I'm trying to reindex my database, however, I'm getting an error. I did some more digging and I think I have to add websolr as an add-on? This costs $20/month. Is this the only option?
THanks
Founder of Websolr + Bonsai here (Heroku addons for Solr and Elasticsearch).
Rich's answer is pretty solid, with the exception of the SQL LIKE operator, which I do not recommend. The performance does not scale, and you're either going to sink in a lot more time than you might expect in order to eke out baseline search functionality. End result: a lot of time spent, and unhappy users.
Postgres full text search is a reasonable alternative, though the term analysis and result ranking will be lacking compared to Solr/Elasticsearch as your search traffic starts to grow in production.
You might also consider our sister service, Bonsai, which does offer a free Starter plan. It uses Elasticsearch, which means you'd want to use the official Ruby bindings for Elasticsearch rather than Sunspot.
Lastly, if you already have a production app on Heroku, you are welcome to create more than one index in your account, and share those indexes with your staging/qa and other apps.
I've done some more research and found out that there are other options if you don't want to take the websolr path. These other answers are good for some insights, but doesn't give an alternative to what can be used.
For some that's still looking, I suggest taking a look at Elastic Search
Rails Cast has a good tutorial on this as well.
And to use it with heroku, look into Bonsai which gives users a free option.
Hopefully this answer will help those that are also seeking other options than using sunspot gem with solr
Solr on Heroku uses their own add-on, which starts at $20pm:
Although I don't know why it costs up front, and doesn't have a "trial" option like many of the other Heroku Add-ons, there are certain ways around it
Full Text Search
Full text search is what you're performing, and Solr is a tool to make the process much more efficient. Despite being quite DB-expensive, you can use full text searching with Heroku, depending on your DB:
MYSQL
To perform full-text searching on MYSQL, you can simply use the "LIKE" operator with %variable% as your search phrase, like this:
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `name` LIKE `%benjamin%`
This basically finds all the records where the name column contains "benjamin" somewhere inside it. This is quite slow
POSTGRESQL
PostgreSQL offers more power in its full text searching, but is nonetheless still quite slow & expensive. You can read more about it here, but with rails, you can use a bunch of gems which do the task for you
We recently used a gem called textacular here: http://firststop.herokuapp.com
Here is the code we used for it:
#Search
def self.search(search)
basic_search(name: search, description: search)
end
Further Reading
You can see how full text searching works here: Any reason not use PostgreSQL's built-in full text search on Heroku?
I would recommend if you're just getting the foundations established for your app. Afterwards, you can upgrade to a more dedicated solution in the form of Solr et al
Here are
If you want to use the Heroku platform it starts for free, but you have to pay for almost every add-on, extra workers, extra storage, search engine, background tasks, you name it.
For $20/month you could also get a decent VPS, but you would have to install and manage that server by yourself.
As for sunspot/solr on Heroku, I don't think you can do that for free.
I'm writing a Ruby on Rails app that would replace an old application. We have an existing Solr service running which I wish to integrate in our new RoR app. What is the best way to approach this? From what I've learned so far online, Sunspot is more suitable for automatically indexing Ruby object in Solr not the other way around (integrating an already existing index) ?!
you can check upon rsolr, on which sunspot is based upon, which will allow you to query on an existing index.
I've a mongoid embedded one to many model on Rails 3.1, to full text search within. I neet something very light and simple to deploy on heroku too, without having to pay for add-ons, initially.
All heroku Full-Text Search add-on currently, seem to have just paying plans (which is no good to start with), see Flying Sphinx and Websolr.
I need advice on a good solution (a ruby gem deployable on heroku) to start with and than to scale to other cloud services eventually.
Maybe MongoDB's core functionalities are enough for your needs:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Full+Text+Search+in+Mongo
There are two more possibilities that come into my mind:
1) you can use this gem:
https://github.com/mauriciozaffari/mongoid_search
2) you can use elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/) and use the following gem:
https://github.com/karmi/tire
However, you couldnt use this solution with heroku only, you would have to setup your own server, for which in the case you want to use heroku, EC2 would be recommendable
We were using the sunspot_mongo gem with solr on Mongoid 2.4.
But after upgrading to Mongoid 3, support for sunspot seems to not be there. So we're investigating a move to elasticsearch with the tire gem. There are some new offerings in the "search as a service space" for elasticsearch, but they don't seem quite production ready yet, so hoping that changes quickly.
Hope it helps!
I would like to do full-text searching of data in my Ruby on Rails application. What options exist?
There are several options available and each have different strengths and weaknesses. If you would like to add full-text searching, it would be prudent to investigate each a little bit and try them out to see how well it works for you in your environment.
MySQL has built-in support for full-text searching. It has online support meaning that when new records are added to the database, they are automatically indexed and will be available in the search results. The documentation has more details.
acts_as_tsearch offers a wrapper for similar built-in functionality for recent versions of PostgreSQL
For other databases you will have to use other software.
Lucene is a popular search provider written in Java. You can use Lucene through its search server Solr with Rails using acts_as_solr.
If you don't want to use Java, there is a port of Lucene to Ruby called Ferret. Support for Rails is added using the acts_as_ferret plugin.
Xapian is another good option and is supported in Rails using the acts_as_xapian plugin.
Finally, my preferred choice is Sphinx using the Ultrasphinx plugin. It is extremely fast and has many options on how to index and search your databases, but is no longer being actively maintained.
Another plugin for Sphinx is Thinking Sphinx which has a lot of positive feedback. It is a little easier to get started using Thinking Sphinx than Ultrasphinx. I would suggest investigating both plugins to determine which fits better with your project.
I can recommend Sphinx. Ryan Bates has a great screencast on using the Thinking Sphinx plugin to create a full-text search solution.
You can use Ferret (which is Lucene written in Ruby). It integrates seamless with Rails using the acts_as_ferret mixin. Take a look at "How to Integrate Ferret With Rails". A alternative is Sphinx.
Two main options, depending on what you're after.
1) Full Text Indexing and MATCH() AGAINST().
If you're just looking to do a fast search against a few text columns in your table, you can simply use a full text index of those columns and use MATCH() AGAINST() in your queries.
Create the full text index in a migration file:
add_index :table, :column, type: :fulltext
Query using that index:
where( "MATCH( column ) AGAINST( ? )", term )
2) ElasticSearch and Searchkick
If you're looking for a full blown search indexing solution that allows you to search for any column in any of your records while still being lightning quick, take a look at ElasticSearch and Searchkick.
ElasticSearch is the indexing and search engine.
Searchkick is the integration library with Rails that makes it very easy to index your records and search them.
Searchkick's README does a fantastic job at explaining how to get up and running and to fine tune your setup, but here is a little snippet:
Install and start ElasticSearch.
brew install elasticsearch
brew services start elasticsearch
Add searchkick gem to your bundle:
bundle add searchkick --strict
The --strict option just tells Bundler to use an exact version in your Gemfile, which I highly recommend.
Add searchkick to a model you want to index:
class MyModel < ApplicationRecord
searchkick
end
Index your records.
MyModel.reindex
Search your index.
matching_records = MyModel.search( "term" )
I've been compiling a list of the various Ruby on Rails search options in this other question. I'm not sure how, or if to combine our questions.
It depends on what database you are using. I would recommend using Solr as it offers up a lot of nice options. The downside is you have to run a separate process for it. I have used Ferret as well, but found it to be less stable in terms of multi-threaded access to the index. I haven't tried Sphinx because it only works with MySQL and Postgres.
Just a note for future reference: Ultra Sphinx is no longer being maintained. Thinking sphinx is its replacement. Although it lacks several features at this time like excerpting which Ultra sphinx had, it makes up for it in other features.
I would recommend acts_as_ferret as I am using it for Scrumpad project at work. The indexing can be done as a separate process which ensures that while re-indexing we can still use our application. This can reduce the downtime of website. Also the searching is much faster. You can search through multiple model at a time and have your results sorted out by the fields you prefer.