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... Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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.... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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).... Continue reading

In my Intro to SuccessFactors reporting with BIRT post I mentioned Filters were an option when using the Report Builder within SuccessFactors, but they are also a useful tool when working with BIRT reports. It is easy to confuse when or rather where is the most effective place to utilize... Continue reading

The ability to use Parameters with a BIRT report can be a wondrous thing. However if you are both new to BIRT and have to use a scripted source like IBM’s Maximo integration, you might find yourself apprehensive on where to begin. Let’s take a look at person_details.rptdesign, an existing... Continue reading

Those new to reporting in SuccessFactors may not realize that there are a few options when it comes to reporting on SuccessFactors data. Some business requirements will be met by using Report Builder and others will require the use of BIRT. Report Builder gives basic table type report structure. After... Continue reading

The following description is based on a recent client experience where I installed and configured Lucidworks Fusion in a 3 virtual server farm, in a very Microsoft dependent environment. My client required that each piece of software run as a self-sufficient Windows Service, which can start itself automatically upon server... Continue reading

Just in time for Halloween... I thought I'd share some experiences we've had lately with Web hosting companies. From time-to-time, we're asked by our customers for guidance related to cloud platforms and hosting providers. This story revolves around one of our clients who asked us to recommend a hosting company... Continue reading

In a world that celebrates efficiency, people are always looking for new and improved ways to streamline their work and automate redundant tasks. Usually in the world of BIRT that translates to utilizing templates and libraries. But what about the time spent in the Expression Builder? If you find yourself... Continue reading

Lucene uses the TF/IDF scoring algorithm to give initial relevance scores to each document as served up in a search result. The score is further influenced by how you set up your query parameters and whether or not (and how) you apply boosting techniques. The parameters that influence scoring are... Continue reading

Innovent Solutions has updated its BIRT Training Course to the latest version of BIRT 4.5.0. Additionally, we have added a new section that focuses on the use and creation of Templates and Libraries. Utilizing templates and libraries is often overlooked, but the simplicity and power of this standard BIRT feature... Continue reading

Merchandising is a cornerstone for many ecommerce sites and empowers online retailers to provide better customer experiences, improve product discovery, increase conversion rates and enhance order values. Broadly speaking, merchandising an ecommerce website involves creating, implementing and measuring strategies that get the right products in front of the shopper with... Continue reading