Innovent Solutions Blog

"Search is Broken!"

How many times have we heard that yelled in our general direction? Search engines, and their teams, are only as good as the data they are given. This is true for all search engines, for all time, regardless of any machine learning algorithms or other bells and whistles they may... Read more →

The Eclipse BIRT Project is Alive!

Congratulations to the Eclipse Foundation BIRT project team on the release of BIRT 4.9.0 which is available at https://github.com/eclipse/birt. This new release revives the Eclipse BIRT project, resolves a number of security vulnerabilities, and makes it available to anyone that wants to build, update, and maintain the code in true... Read more →

Great Search & Merchandising with SAP Commerce and Solr

We have worked with many SAP Commerce (Hybris) clients over the years who have had success using Adaptive Search to address relevancy issues and perform merchandising but felt limited, particularly considering Adaptive Search is very focused on category results. To increase conversion rates, enhance order values and provide the experiences... Read more →

Getting Started with the BIRT-Spring-Boot-Starter

Introduction The Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) is an open source framework that allows developers to build production ready reports. BIRT provides a basic WebViewer to deploy reports, but this solution is not ideal as a production ready system. The WebViewer does not support security, content management, email,... Read more →

Endeca migration to FindTuner

Our Client sought to replace its aging Endeca platform to achieve some important goals including gaining control over the search codebase, reducing operational costs and providing better customer experiences. Client partnered with Innovent Solutions to replace Endeca with FindTuner and Solr to power search, navigation and merchandising on its ecommerce... Read more →

Avoid the Parent/Child Trap: Tips and Tricks for Denormalizing Solr Data

Solr has multiple ways of dealing with parent-child relationships, and each have their own features and drawbacks. Classic Joins have well documented performance issues, especially on larger datasets. Block-Joins require additional indexing work and still increase document count which affects performance to a lesser degree. Full denormalization (having only parents as Solr documents) can be difficult to implement without losing functionality. Recently, we engaged with a client to move them from a Block-Join configuration to a full denormalized solution. Here are some of the tips and tricks to consider if you are looking to make a similar move. Read more →

Quick Reporting From the Cloud With Lambda and Pentaho

We were recently engaged by a charitable foundation to come up with a simple way to generate Pentaho reports on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. The charitable foundation had already created the reports with Pentaho, but preferred not to deploy a full Pentaho BI Server on an EC2 instance.... Read more →

Searching for Online Grocery: You Got Your Chocolate In My Peanut Butter

At a Glance Consumers are pushing the grocery industry into digital retail. Mirroring the in-store experience creates significant challenges for online grocery. Organizing products with emergent and flexible taxonomies can better serve new consumers. Great search and navigation, with precise and powerful merchandising, create dynamic and rewarding consumer experiences and... Read more →

Finding the Right Tune with Solr and Machine Learning

Overview Recently, a client engaged us to implement More Like This (MLT) search with their Solr platform to make it more efficient for their customers to locate music. The music they find would be used with movies, television shows, commercials and similar productions. At a high-level, customers want to find... Read more →

Edismax Queries in a post-Solr 5.5 World: The AND, the OR, and the Ugly

I was recently helping one of our many FindTuner clients to address an issue that had been discovered after updating to Solr 6.2. Originally a search for a product, where products were being added through merchandising strategies into the results, would return 50 results (49 organically, and 1 artificially added).... Read more →