Fusion Server combines the Apache Solr open source search engine with the distributed power of Apache Spark for artificial intelligence. Highly scalable, Fusion Server indexes and stores data for real-time discovery.
  • Index billions of records of any type, from any data source
  • Process thousands of queries per second from thousands of concurrent users
  • Conduct full-text search using standard SQL capabilities and powerful analytics
To learn about the latest Fusion features and changes, see the Fusion release notes.

Key Concepts

Fusion’s ecosystem allows you to manage and access your data in an intuitive fashion. See Concepts for more information.

Apache Solr

Solr is the fast open source search platform built on Apache Lucene™ that provides scalable indexing and search, as well as faceting, hit highlighting, and advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities. Solr and Lucene are managed by the Apache Software Foundation. For more information, see the Solr Reference Guide for your Fusion release.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark is an open source cluster-computing framework that serves as a fast and general execution engine for large-scale data processing jobs that can be decomposed into stepwise tasks, which are distributed across a cluster of networked computers. Spark improves on previous MapReduce implementations by using resilient distributed datasets (RDDs), a distributed memory abstraction that lets programmers perform in-memory computations on large clusters in a fault-tolerant manner. See Apache Spark for more information.

Connectors

Connectors are the out-of-the-box components for pulling your data into Fusion. Lucidworks provides a wide variety of connectors, each specialized for a particular data type. When you add a datasource to a collection, you specify the connector to use for ingesting data. Connectors are distributed separately from Fusion Server. For complete information, see Fusion Connectors. Fusion offers dozens of connectors so you can access your data from a large variety of sources. To learn more about Fusion connectors, see connectors concepts or the connectors section.

Pipelines

Pipelines dictate how data flows through Fusion and becomes accessible by a search application. Fusion has two types of pipelines: index pipelines and query pipelines. Index pipelines ingest data, indexes it, and stores it in a format that is optimized for searching. Query pipelines filter, transform, and augment Solr queries and responses in order to return all and only the most relevant search results.

How-to Information

Want to start right away?
This tutorial takes you from installation to application-ready search data in four easy parts, using a MovieLens dataset.
  • Part 1: Run Fusion and Create an App Download, install Fusion, and run Fusion, then create a Movie Search app.
  • Part 2: Get Data In Use the Index Workbench to configure an index pipeline, preview the results, and get data into the Movie Search app in a format that is useful for search.
  • Part 3: Get Data Out Use Query Workbench to get data out of the Movie Search app, explore the role of query pipeline stages, configure faceting, and preview search results.
  • Part 4: Improve Relevancy Use signals and boosting to make search results more relevant.
Looking to upgrade your Fusion instance?
When you have a Fusion-based search application running, at some point it might be necessary to upgrade to a later version of Fusion. We provide a migrator tool to simplify the upgrade process.
See the release history to find out what is new, including which versions of Solr, Spark, and ZooKeeper are bundled with each Fusion release.
The migrator transfers over most of the objects that make up your search application, all configurations and customizations for your application, and all data in collections in the application.
In some cases, manual steps are required for objects that the migrator cannot handle automatically. We give you instructions and guidance about what might be required. You should also review the log of the upgrade in /opt/fusion/x.y.z/var/upgrade/tmp/migrator.log (on Unix) or C:\lucidworks\var\fusion\x.y.z\upgrade\tmp\migrator.log (on Windows). The x.y.z directory is for the Fusion version that you are migrating from.

Key points

Following are some key points about upgrading Fusion:
  • Migration involves down time. The upgrade process involves multiple starts and stops of Fusion services. Please plan accordingly, especially in terms of disabling external load balancers or monitors that might react adversely to the starts and stops.
  • Current deployment is preserved. Upgrades preserve the current Fusion deployment, copying information over from the current deployment to the new one. This provides a rapid roll-back option if you encounter problems during the upgrade process.
  • If the upgrade fails. If an upgrade fails, there is a procedure for dealing with that.

Supported upgrade sequences

Only specific version-to-version upgrade sequences are supported. Some upgrades require multiple steps.
These upgrade sequences are supported.

Upgrades to the current version

  • 3.1.x to 4.2.y. From any 3.1.x version to 4.2.6 SP1 (one step, using the migrator)
  • 4.0.x to 4.2.y. From any 4.0.x version to 4.2.6 SP1 (one step, using the migrator)
  • 4.1.x to 4.2.y. From any 4.1.x version to 4.2.6 SP1 (one step, using the migrator)
For links to these procedures, see Per-version instruction sets.

Upgrades to prior versions

Using the migrator:
  • 3.1.x to 4.0.y. From 3.1.5 directly to 4.0.2 (one step) For more information, see Upgrade Fusion 3.1.x to 4.0.y.
  • 4.0.x to 4.0.y. From 4.0.0 or 4.0.1 to 4.0.2 (one step) For more information, see Upgrade Fusion Server 4.0.x to 4.0.y.
  • 3.1.x to 4.1.y. From any 3.1.x version to 4.1.3 (one step, using the migrator) For more information, see Upgrade Fusion Server 3.1.x to 4.1.y.
  • 4.0.x to 4.1.y. From 4.0.2 to 4.1.3 (one step, using the migrator) For more information, see Upgrade Fusion Server 4.0.x to 4.1.y.
  • 4.1.x to 4.1.y. From 4.1.0 to 4.1.3 (one step, using the migrator) For more information, see Upgrade Fusion Server 4.1.x to 4.1.y.

Example

For example, to upgrade from Fusion 3.0.1 to Fusion Server 4.2.5, you would perform the following upgrades (both of them using the migrator):
  1. Upgrade from Fusion 3.0.1 to Fusion 3.1.5
  2. Upgrade from Fusion 3.1.5 to Fusion Server 4.2.5

Per-version instruction sets

To upgrade to a later version of Fusion from an existing installation requires transferring over all configurations and data from your existing Fusion installation to the new version.How to upgrade from Fusion 3.1.x to Fusion Server 4.2.yPerform the steps in this article:Upgrade from Fusion Server 3.1.x to 4.2.y - Run a migrator to upgrade from Fusion Server 3.1.x to 4.2.y.How to upgrade from Fusion 4.0.x to Fusion Server 4.2.yPerform the steps in this article:Upgrade from Fusion Server 4.0.x to 4.2.y - Run a migrator to upgrade from Fusion Server 4.0.x to 4.2.y.How to upgrade from Fusion 4.1.x to Fusion Server 4.2.yPerform the steps in this article:Upgrade from Fusion Server 4.1.x to 4.2.y - Run a migrator to upgrade from Fusion Server 4.1.x to 4.2.y.How to upgrade from Fusion 4.2.x to Fusion Server 4.2.yPerform the steps in this article:Upgrade from Fusion Server 4.2.x to 4.2.y - Run a migrator to upgrade from Fusion Server 4.2.x to 4.2.y.

Important Reference Information

Our reference section includes information on Fusion’s API, index pipelines stages, query pipelines stages, connections, and more. See Reference for complete reference information.