On Wednesday, May 9, I was a breakout spearker at the 2012 Lucene Revolution conference in Boston on Using Solr/Lucene to Surface the Big Data of Social Media. Solr is an open source technology most known for its capabilities as a search engine. Big Data is a recent IT trend where large amounts of data (both in terms of volume and rate) are collected and used. The amount of data is too large for a single relational database to handle. Social Media is any system where the users contribute content and express affinity for other content and those actions get published to the user's social graph.
In this presentation, I focused on how to use Solr as a kind of NoSql solution for Big Data. Topics included scaling Solr both up and out, sharding, replication, caching, SOA, indexing, and synchronization. I gave advise on how best to integrate Solr with other open source technologies such as Jetty, RabbitMQ, Spring, Ehcache, and HOWL.