Based on some recent projects, I am seeing a trend that continues to blur the lines between business intelligence (BI) and application development. It’s only fitting to blog about this topic since Progress Software is the worldwide leader in data connectivity and earned Gartner’s Visionary status for its application development platform.

My recent intelligent application consulting projects:

BI Platform	Requirements	Sources of Data
Oracle Business Intelligence OBIEE	Dashboards that enable core interactive business decisions in real-time	Oracle, Force.com
SAP Business Objects	Intelligence portal that merges data warehouse history with up to the minute search capabilities	SQL Server, Apache SOLR
Qlikview	Interactive charts to move historic opportunity data from warehouse to operational CRM	Teradata, Salesforce
Tableau hosted in Rollbase	Interactive project activity application that refreshes analytics in real-time using DataDirect Cloud.	Rollbase, OpenEdge

As the appdev/BI lines continue to blur, there is increased interest in querying unstructured data such as Apache SOLR.  To provide standards based connectivity to Solr, DataDirect provides self service rapid development capabilities to build a prototype in days.  This is achieved with DataDirect OpenAccess, and I will share my Apache Solr ODBC connector built last Saturday morning that took me less than an hour.

Less than an hour to ODBC and JDBC connectivity to Apache SOLR

1-      Get started with SOLR tutorial: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/4_6_0/tutorial.html (for test purposes, I launched jetty with Solr WAR from example folder as “java -jar start”)

2-      Indexed sample data in exampledocs: user:~/solr/example/exampledocs$ java -jar post.jar *.xml

3-      Verify query works: http://localhost:8983/solr/collection1/select?q=solr&wt=json

4-      Install and configure the OpenAccess SDK by following the OpenAccess SDK Installation Guide.

5-      Configure the DataDirect OpenAccess sample for Apache Solr.

6-      Once complete, below is sample query using Interactive SQL (ODBC):

ISQL> SELECT * FROM SOLRDOCS WHERE QUERY = ‘solr’
NAME ID FEATURES QUERY
Solr, the Enterprise Search Server SOLR1000 {id=SOLR1000, name=Solr,
 the Enterprise Search Server, manu=Apache Software Foundation, cat=[software, s
earch], features=[Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities using Lucene, Optimized
 for High Volume Web Traffic, Standards Based Open Interfaces - XML and HTTP, Co
mprehensive HTML Administration Interfaces, Scalability - Efficient Replication
to other Solr Search Servers, Flexible and Adaptable with XML configuration and
Schema, Good unicode support: héllo (hello with an accent over the e)], price=0.
0, price_c=0,USD, popularity=10, inStock=true, incubationdate_dt=Mon Jan 16 19:0
0:00 EST 2006, _version_=1457970426419347456} *

Rows selected = 1

Solr data returned to Microsoft Excel using ODBC

What about importing data into Solr?

DataDirect has an amazing selection of JDBC drivers (relational data sources,SaaS sources such as Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, and aPaaS such as Rollbase, Force.com) if you're looking to import data into your Solr server using the DataImportHandler JDBC interface for data imports.

Are you a data architect, project manager, or java developer with questions?

Call us at 1-800-876-3101 to learn more about how DataDirect OpenAccess can get you connected using ODBC or JDBC to Apache SOLR, as well as any web service API or unstructured data source.  This is one of those projects everyone at a data driven organization will want their hands on.