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Your data is organized into collections. When you create an app, Lucidworks Search automatically creates a collection with the same name. You can create additional collections in any app. A primary collection contains the data that your users will search. Every primary collection is associated with a set of auxiliary collections that contain related data, such as signals, aggregations, and more. Under the hood, a Lucidworks Search collection is a distributed index in Solr, defined by a named configuration stored in ZooKeeper, with these properties:
  • Number of shards. Documents are distributed across this number of partitions.
  • Document routing strategy. How documents are assigned to shards.
  • Replication factor. How many copies of each document in the collection.
  • Replica placement strategy. Where to place replicas in the cluster.
If your data is already stored in a Solr instance or cluster, you can manage this collection in Lucidworks Search by creating a Lucidworks Search collection that imports the existing Solr collection.
Collection names are case-insensitive, but Lucidworks Search preserves case when displaying collection names.

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Auxiliary collections

Every primary collection is associated with a set of auxiliary collections that contain related data, such as signals, aggregations, and more. Some auxiliary collections are created for every primary collection. Others are created only for the app’s default collection, one per app. Auxiliary collections are described below:
Don’t create primary collections with names that end in the suffixes above; these are reserved for Lucidworks Search auxiliary collections, which are created and managed by Lucidworks Search directly.
Lucidworks Search maintains a set of Solr collections that store Lucidworks Search’s own log files and other internal information. These are called System Collections, described below.
Don’t create primary collections named “logs” or beginning with “system_”. These names are reserved for Lucidworks Search system collections.
Lucidworks Search uses ZooKeeper to register information about all collections, and the Lucidworks Search components and services related to a collection. The Lucidworks Search components associated with a collection include:
  • Datasources
  • Pipelines
  • Profiles
  • Signals and aggregations
  • Analytics dashboards

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System collections

Lucidworks Search automatically creates some collections that are used for internal purposes and shared across all apps:
  • system_autocomplete stores the content that the Lucidworks Search UI displays when you use the search bar.
  • system_blobs stores blobs in Solr. This is used to store model files for the NLP components and other binary files used by Lucidworks Search components.
  • system_history keeps a record of configuration changes, start and stop times for services and experiments, and more.
  • system_jobs_history keeps a record of Lucidworks Search jobs, including start/stop times and status.

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Collection configuration properties

Collections have three properties that you can configure only when you are creating a collection using the Collections API. *Signals are events with timestamps that can be used to improve search results. For more information about signals in Lucidworks Search, see Signals in the Lucidworks Search documentation. In schemaless mode, if a document contains a field not currently in the Solr schema, Solr processes the field value to determine what the field type should be defined as, and then adds a new field to the schema with the field name and field type. This behavior can be convenient during preliminary application development, but it’s rarely appropriate in a production environment.

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Using profiles to associate collections with pipelines

Index pipelines and query pipelines aren’t connected to a specific collection by default. Index profiles and query profiles are configurations that create consistent endpoints for indexing and querying, each with a specific pipeline and collection.

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Fields Editor UI

The Fields Editor UI allows you to create and configure the schema file directly from Lucidworks Search. For instructions, see Fields Editor UI.

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Learn more

Fusion Applications and Collections

The course for Fusion Applications and Collections focuses on how Fusion transforms your siloed data into personalized insights unique to each user with apps and collections.