In order to prepare for the Lucid Solr/Lucene Developer Certification exam, you should be comfortable with the following topics:

• Lucene Background
• Indexing
• Searching
• Debugging Solr
• General Solr knowledge
• Architecting a Deployment
• General search and web application environment topics

Details on concepts included in each topic area are included below.

Lucene Background

• Understand Lucene scoring methods such as TF-IDF and how to debug Lucene’s output.

• Understand Lucene payloads.

• Understand merge algorithms used by Lucene.

• Be familiar with the Lucene index file format.

• Understand how Lucene uses segments and merging, and how this impacts the performance of an application.

• Be familiar with the different types of queries, such as term queries, phrase queries, and wildcard queries.

• Be familiar with the different options available when defining a field, such as storage, indexing, analysis, vectors, positions, and frequencies.

• Know what Lucene options can be tuned through Solr.

   

Indexing

• Understand the advantages and disadvantages of distributed indexing strategies, and how they affect performance and capabilities of an application.

• Know how to configure indexing so that faceting is available.

• Be familiar with indexing best practices, such as batching adds, multi-threaded adds, and using a streaming update server.

• Understand how indexing best practices can affect searching, highlighting, faceting, and sorting.

• Be familiar with the capabilities of Solr Cell and the parameters involved.

• Understand the DataImportHander configuration file format.

• Be familiar with available DataImportHandler entity processors and transformers.

• Know how to debug the DataImportHandler.

• Understand the parameters and trade-offs of various commit strategies.

• Be familiar with the update processor chain.

• Understand use cases for full builds and incremental builds.

• Be able to recognize when a full rebuild is necessary.

• Understand index writer configuration.

• Be familiar with the various update request handlers, such as XML, CSV, and so on, and their default URLs.

Searching

• Understand security filters.

• Understand how an analyzer works.

• Be familiar with the syntax for the Lucene query parser.

• Be familiar with the syntax for the Dismax query parser.

• Be familiar with common query parameters.

• Understand how Solr's cache is used by features such as filters and faceting.

• Understand the local parameter syntax.

• Know what kinds of query parsers are available to Solr.

• Be familiar with the best usage for each type of query parser.

• Be familiar with use cases for faceting.

• Understand the parameters necessary to use search faceting.

• Understand faceting algorithms as implemented in Solr.

• Be familiar with how various features such as searching, faceting, sorting, caching, and warming affect memory requirements in Solr.

• Know when to use filters instead of modifying the main query.

• Be familiar with the parameters necessary to use highlighting.

• Understand Solr spatial functions and request parameters, such as field types, functions, and request parameters.

• Understand the use cases for field collapsing.

• Be familiar with the parameters involved in field collapsing.

• Understand how Solr implements field collapsing.

• Be familiar with Solr's boost function, and how it can be used to affect the position of a returned result based on factors such as recency, popularity, price, and so on.

• Understand boosting based on proximity.

• Be familiar with the syntax used to find the time elapsed between date values.

• Be familiar with the search request handler, and how it can be used with search components.

• Be able to list the built-in search components included with Solr, such as elevated queries, faceting, highlighting, “more like this”, and spellcheck.

• Be able to list the built-in response writers, such as XML, JSON, Java, and PHP.

• Understand function queries and how they can be used in a search.

  
  
  

Debugging Solr

• Understand the debug parameters provided by Solr, and how they affect output.

• Be familiar with the debugging tools provided with Solr, such as analysis.jsp, the schema browser, the Luke request handler, and the stats page.

General Solr

• Understand what security options are available within Solr, and how to configure them.

• Be familiar with the various configuration files needed to run Solr, such as solr.xml, solrconfig.xml, and schema.xml.

• Know how to deploy Solr to an existing web container.

• Know how to propagate environment variables through to a Solr configuration.

• Know how to tell Solr to store data in a non-default location.

• Understand the field types built into a standard Solr installation, and their options.

• Understand the difference between query analyzers and index analyzers, and how they relate to each other in the context of an application.

• Be familiar with techniques Solr uses to perform analysis.

• Be familiar with best practices related to search, such as domain modeling and knowing when to use features such as OmitNorms.

• Know when to use index boosting rather than query boosting, and vice versa.

• Understand how to add custom code to the Solr classpath.

• Understand Solr cache settings and how they impact performance.

• Understand why dynamic fields exist, and when you should use them.

• Be familiar with the Solr external API.

• Be familiar with the various Solr client libraries, and how they can be used to build an application.

• Know where to find the Solr logs, and how they can be used in troubleshooting an application.

• Be familiar with various relevancy manipulation strategies.

• Understand the "cost" of a commit, and how it affects an application.

• Be familiar with Solr plug-in hooks and capabilities.

• Be familiar with the techniques necessary for writing a Solr plug-in.

• Understand the parameters related to replicating a Solr server.

• Understand the failure modes of various components, such as replication and the DataImportHandler.

• Know what features are available in various Solr releases.

• Know where various components can be found within the Solr directory structure.

• Understand the core Solr admin APIs.

• Be familiar with the Solr source code.

• Be familiar with the configuration options available in solrconfig.xml, and where to find them.

• Know how to reference external file resources from within Solr's configuration.

• Understand analysis techniques for both Western languages and Asian scripts.

Architecting a Deployment

• Know how to set up distributed search so that a single request can be processed by multiple Solr instances.

• Understand the organization of a cluster of Solr servers.

• Know when it is appropriate to use distribution search.

• Be familiar with use cases that indicate replication, and the best practices involved.

• Final questions and answers created and rated on what developers would need to know

  
  
  

General Background Topics

• Know how to execute a Java application from a command line environment.

• Know how to install and test a Java development environment.

• Know how to create, compile, and run a Java application.

• Understand and be able to manage JNDI initialization parameters.

• Understand Java configurations, such as garbage collection options and memory allocation, and how they can impact performance.

• Know how to use techniques such as debugging, memory tools, or examining stack traces or GC logs to troubleshoot Java applications.

• Understand how Java libraries are packaged and deployed.

• Be familiar with configuring a web container in order to perform tasks such as changing port numbers.

• Understand performance monitoring techniques such as measuring query speed or query throughput.

• Be familiar with network protocols such as HTTP.

• Be familiar with common application server internals, such as classloader hierarchies and logging configurations.

• Be familiar with XML, and be able to troubleshoot issues such as markup errors or unescaped special characters.

• Be comfortable with basic administrative tasks for a *nix system, such as installing packages and managing file permissions.

• Understand how Solr interacts with various file systems such as ext*, HFS Plus, and NTFS, and how those interactions can impact performance.

• Understand the differences between various operating systems, filesystems, and Java virtual machines, and how they can impact performance.

• Understand general information retrieval techniques, such as inverted indexes, calculating relevance, and common techniques for implementing search.