After over 60 resolved tasks, we’re proud to release Hibernate Search version 5.6.0.Beta1.
The Elasticsearch integration made significant progress, and we believe it to be ready for wider usage.
Progress of the Elasticsearch integration
Improvements since the previous milestone:
- MassIndexer
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significant better performance as it now uses bulk operations.
- Calendar, Dates, numbers and mapping details
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several corrections and improvements were made to produce a cleaner schema.
- Cluster state
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we now wait for a newly started Elasticsearch cluster to be "green" - or optionally "yellow" - before starting to use it.
- WildFly modules
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a critical bug was resolved, the modules should work fine now.
- Many more
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for a full list of all 63 improvements, see this JIRA query.
What is missing yet?
- Performance testing
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we didn’t do much performance testing, it’s probably not as efficient as it could be.
- Relax the expected Elasticsearch version
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it’s being tested with version 2.3.1 but we have plans to support a wider range of versions.
- Explicit refresh requests
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we plan to add methods to issue an indexreader refresh request, as the changes pushed to Elasticsearch are not immediately visible by default.
- Your Feedback!
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we think it’s in pretty good shape, it would be great for more people to try it out and let us know what is missing and how it’s working for you.
Notable differences between using embededd Lucene vs Elasticsearch
Unless you reconfigure Hibernate Search to use an async worker, by default when using the Lucene backend after you commit a transaction the changes to the index are immediately applied and any subsequent search will "see" the changes. On Elasticsearch the default is different: changes received by the cluster are only "visible" to searches after some seconds (1 by default).
You can reconfigure Hibernate Search to force a refresh of indexes after each write operation by using the hibernate.search.default.elasticsearch.refresh_after_write configuration setting.
This setting defaults to false as that’s the recommended setting for optimal performance on Elasticsearch.
You might want to set this to true to make it simpler to write unit tests, but you should take care to not rely on the synchronous
behaviour for your production code.
Improvements for embedded Lucene users
While working on Elasticsearch, we also applied some performance improvements which apply to users of the traditional Lucene embedded users.
Special thanks to Andrej Golovnin, who contributed several patches to reduce allocation of objects on the hot path and improve overall performance.
How to get this release
Everything you need is available on Hibernate Search’s web site.
Get it from Maven Central using the above coordinates.
Downloads from Sourceforge are available as well.
Feedback
Feedback always welcome!
Please let us know of any problem or suggestion by creating an issue on JIRA, or by sending an email to the developer’s developer’s mailing lists, or posting on the forums.
We also monitor Stack Overflow; when posting on SO please use the tag hibernate-search.
