Starting from Solr 9, Solr does not contain anymore the Data Import Handler (DIH) package anymore starting from Solr 9. Furthermore, as of July 2022, no one really committed to maintain and update it regularly. Yet it had a large users base, who is now looking for alternatives.
One of the main goals of DIH was to index databases easily into Solr.
In this page, we are going to explain how to do it with Datafari Community Edition, the open source solution Datafari which is an open source alternative of DIH. Indeed Datafari contains out of the box version of Datafari Enterprise Search. Thanks to several years of work, Datafari integrates seamlessly much more than what you will need to replace DIH, but we focus here on how to just replace DIH for a scenario with Solr. Out of the box and focusing on our DIH replacement scenario, Datafari 5.2 contains :
Apache ManifoldCF which is a framework of connectors (ManifoldCF is coded in Java and the output connection to Solr is configured out of the box into Datafari in SolrCloud mode so it is a smart client to index very quickly millions of documents into Solr)
Solr 8 to index data crawled from MCF
and the webapp Datafari with a user interface to search into the data (as a bonus, since it is not needed in the DIH replacement scenario)
There are three main steps that we will detail :
Download and install Datafari
(optional - not needed for PostgreSQL) Add the JDBC driver that corresponds to your database (indeed we do not have the right to include it in Datafari due to licence issues for Oracle MariaDB or MySQL for example) unless if you crawl are crawling a PostgreSQL database : , in which case the JDBC driver is already included)
NB : into the The next version of Datafari (5.3) , we will inclued include by defaut the JDBC driver for Microsoft SQL server too because it has a MIT licenseand Oracle server.Create your crawl job
Right after these steps, you can begin to search into your data !
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For this tutorial, we use two instances on Scaleway :
GPS1 8x86 64 bit 32 Go RAM, 300 Go NVME with Debian 11
IP Datafari server : 51.158.69.126
IP MySQL server : 163.172.184.196
We will install Datafari into on one instance, and a MySQL server 8 into another instance. The on the other one. Note that the installation of MySQL and the ingestion of a dataset into it are detailed into the annex of the page because it is out of scope of this pagetutorial, and as such they are detailed in an annex.
1. Download and install Datafari
Connect into SSH to your server
Download latest stable version of Datafari :
Code Block wget https://www.datafari.com/files/debian/datafari.deb
Install To install the dependencies of Datafari, to do that download the our convenient script to install them automatically :
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wget https://www.datafari.com/files/scripts_init_datafari/init_server_datafari_5_debian_10_plus.sh |
Then Now execute the init script :
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cd /opt/datafari/bin bash init-datafari.sh |
Voila And Voilà! Datafari is installed and functional. You can connect to https://$IP_OF_YOUR_DATAFARI_SERVER/datafariui
In our example : https://51.158.69.126/datafariui
For more information see this page : Install Datafari - Community Edition
2. Install the JDBC driver into Datafari
In our example, we want to crawl a database into MySQL version 8.0.29.
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For more information, see this page : Connector - Add a JDBC connector (MySQL, Oracle)
Restart Datafari
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- You have 2 options to do it :
Option 1 - Via the Datafari admin UI :
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Go to the main server of Datafari, then click on Services Administration and Restart.
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Option 2 - By restarting Datafari via SSH :
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cd /opt/datafari/bin
bash stop-datafari.sh
bash start-datafari.sh
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For more information about restart of restarting Datafari, see this page : /wiki/spaces/DATAFARI/pages/111903130
The final step is to configure the crawling job.
3. Configure the job
Go to the admin Datafari UI then go to Connectors → Data Crawler Simplified mode and select Create Database job.
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You will need to fill in all the mandatory parameters to configure the job.
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Then you can check if all is ok into in your MCF : https://$IP_OF_YOUR_DATAFARI_SERVER/datafari-mcf-crawler-ui/
In our example : https://51.158.69.126/datafari-mcf-crawler-ui/
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Depending on the number of raws into rows in your database, the job will be first in ‘starting up’ mode to get all the ids of the documents to crawl. Then the real job Only then will the “real” act of crawling will start, and the job will be in running “running” mode.
If you need to do some modifications into modify your job, simply edit it then relaunch the job.
Finally go to Datafari and search into your data (optional, you do not need DatafariUI, you can do as you were doing before when you were combining DIH and Solr) :
Go to https://$IP_OF_DATAFARI_SERVER/datafariui
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You have a complete search solution in alternative to DIH, based on Apache ManifoldCF and Apache Solr.
Annexes
We detail here the steps we did to install MySQL server into the Scaleway instance.
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