Hibernate Search is a library that integrates Hibernate ORM with Apache Lucene or Elasticsearch by automatically indexing entities, enabling advanced search functionality: full-text, geospatial, aggregations and more. For more information, see Hibernate Search on hibernate.org.

We just published Hibernate Search 6.0.0.Beta10.

This release mainly brings a total hit count threshold, conditional indexing, better timeouts, and per-index analyzer definitions for Elasticsearch.

It also includes an upgrade to Lucene 8.6.1, Elasticsearch 7.9.0 and Hibernate ORM 5.4.21.Final.

Getting started with Hibernate Search 6

If you want to dive right into the new, shiny Hibernate Search 6, a good starting point is the getting started guide included in the reference documentation.

Hibernate Search 6 APIs differ significantly from Hibernate Search 5.

For more information about migration and what we intend to do to help you, see the migration guide.

What’s new

Total hit count threshold

As of HSEARCH-3517, Hibernate Search is now able to take advantage of Lucene’s total hit count threshold.

This optimization is often seen in web search engines as the total amount of hits being displayed as "more than 1,000,000 hits", or some other large number, rather than the exact count.

If your application works on large indexes and can accept a lower-bound estimate of the total hit count for queries with lots of hits in order to shave off a few milliseconds from the query execution time, then go ahead and try it: you will find more information in this section of the documentation.

This optimization is only relevant when executing a search query that sorts on the score (the default). Any other custom sort will likely prevent this optimization from being applied.

Conditional indexing

Hibernate Search 5 used to allow conditional indexing through the definition of entity indexing interceptors. This was particularly useful when only a subset of entities needs to be indexed, for example only entities with the status PUBLISHED, while the others should be ignored.

As of HSEARCH-3108, this feature is coming back to Hibernate Search 6, though in a slightly different form. Instead of indexing interceptors, you will need to define a RoutingBridge, and instead of overriding the indexing operation (add/update/delete/…​) you will define the routes that a document should follow when indexed (potentially no route, when not indexed).

For more information, see this section of the documentation.

Per-index analyzer definitions for Elasticsearch

As of HSEARCH-3309, with the Elasticsearch backend, analyzers and normalizers can now be defined on a specific index instead of globally for all indexes.

This is especially useful when adding a very specific analyzer to an existing application, and when this analyzer is only relevant to a few indexes: you will now be able to add the analyzer only on these indexes, and you won’t have to re-create the unaffected indexes if their mapping didn’t change in any other way.

Configuring analyzers for a specific index is as easy as setting the configuration property hibernate.search.backend.indexes.<index name>.analysis.configurer to the name/class of your analysis configurer. This will override the backend-level analysis configurer, allowing you to configure analyzers and normalizers for this index (and this index only) as you see fit.

For more information, see this section of the documentation.

Improved timeouts

As of HSEARCH-3787, search query timeouts will now be properly forwarded to Hibernate ORM when loading entities.

Previously, when a timeout of 500ms was set on a search query, if the Lucene or Elasticsearch execution took 200ms and then the database queries to load entities took 5 seconds, the timeout wasn’t triggered. This is no longer the case.

The Hibernate ORM timeout is only precise down to the second, because of a limitation of the underlying layer, JDBC. So in the example above, Hibernate ORM will only abort after 1 second (which is still arguably better than 5 seconds).

Additionally, as of HSEARCH-2505, timeouts of the Elasticsearch backend work a bit differently:

  • The default connection timeout, which aborts a connection if it takes to long to establish, is down from 3 seconds to 1 second.

  • The default read timeout, which cancel a request if Elasticsearch takes too long to respond, is down from 60 seconds to 30 seconds.

  • The request timeout, which sets a hard deadline for Hibernate Search to process, send and receive a response to a request, is now unlimited by default.

    This means in particular that by default, sending many indexing requests simultaneously, then waiting for them all to be processed over a long period of time, should no longer lead to internal timeouts because a lot of requests are waiting in queues.

  • Requests that require a higher timeout (search queries with an explicitly defined timeout, in particular) will automatically raise the request timeout and read timeout as necessary on a per-request basis.

    This means you will no longer get a low-level timeout when executing a search query and explicitly specifying a very large timeout.

  • The timeout of search queries will now properly take into account the time spent in internal queues.

    This means if a search query has a timeout of 500ms and it spends 600ms in internal queues without being sent, it will now abort as expected.

Version upgrades

Hibernate Search 6 requires ORM 5.4.4.Final or later to work correctly. Earlier 5.4.x versions will lead to potentially cryptic runtime exceptions.

Breaking changes

  • HSEARCH-3979: @IndexedEmbedded(maxDepth = …​) has been renamed to includeDepth. The older syntax is deprecated and will be removed before the 6.0.0.Final release.

  • SearchResult#totalHitCount() is now deprecated in favor of total().hitCount(). The older syntax will be removed before the 6.0.0.Final release.

  • RoutingKeyBridge and RoutingKeyBinder are now deprecated. You should use RoutingBridge and RoutingBinder instead; see this section of the documentation. The older interfaces will be removed before the 6.0.0.Final release.

  • HSEARCH-2505: Default timeouts of the Elasticsearch backend have changed (see Improved timeouts):

    • The default connection timeout is down from 3 seconds to 1 second.

    • The default read timeout is down from 60 seconds to 30 seconds.

    • The request timeout is now unlimited by default.

    • Requests that require a higher timeout will automatically raise the approriate timeouts on a per-request basis.

  • Some interfaces of the Search DSL now have different generic parameters; this should only affect applications that store DSL steps into variables, which is generally not recommended (use the fluent syntax instead).

Documentation

No significant changes to the documentation apart from those related to new features.

Other improvements and bug fixes

  • HSEARCH-3975: The query returned by Search.toOrmQuery(…​) now supports scroll() and scroll(ScrollMode.FORWARD_ONLY).

  • HSEARCH-3980: It is now possible to determine if a given field is multi-valued in the root document by getting its descriptor from the metamodel and then calling IndexFieldDescriptor#multiValuedInRoot.

  • HSEARCH-3988: Calling search(…​).select(…​) no longer drops the type of loading options, preventing their definition.

  • HSEARCH-3993: Types char, boolean, byte, float, double and their respective boxed types can now be used as document identifiers out-of-the-box.

And more. For a full list of changes since the previous releases, please see the release notes.

How to get this release

All details are available and up to date on the dedicated page on hibernate.org.

Feedback, issues, ideas?

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