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Experiments in Visualizing Lucene Index Structures

Bearded Wookie is here!

A while ago someone asked me for a entity diagram for the Solr “database”. My first, and rather snarky, plan was to provide a single table called collection with a set of columns. Just draw it up real quickly.

Then I thought to myself, wait, this person really does want to understand what is in the index. And you know, I’ve had that same challenge. On every consulting engagement where Solr was already in use. Reading schema.xml kinda sucks, and the dynamic schema browser doesn’t let me see the big picture.

So I went ahead and did some experiments with exposing Lucene structure via bubble charts and tree maps (yes, I wanted to play with D3!).

The experiments, code named bearded wookie are posted at http://www.opensourceconnections.com/bearded-wookie, and you can try the visualizations out with your own Solr setups.