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 are pleased to announce the release of Hibernate Search 7.1.0.Final.

Compared to Hibernate Search 7.0, this release introduces vector search capabilities, allows looking up the capabilities of each field in the metamodel, adds a new query string predicate, simplifies the entity registration in the Standalone POJO mapper, brings compatibility with Elasticsearch 8.12 and OpenSearch 2.12, upgrades to Lucene 9.9, and brings other bugfixes and improvements.

What’s new compared to Hibernate Search 7.0

Dependency upgrades

Lucene

The Lucene backend now uses Lucene 9.9. Besides other improvements it brings better vector search performance.

Elasticsearch

The Elasticsearch backend works with Elasticsearch 8.12 as well as other versions that were already compatible.

OpenSearch

The Elasticsearch backend works with OpenSearch 2.12 as well as other versions that were already compatible.

Hibernate Search now allows vector search in Lucene and Elasticsearch backends as an incubating feature. Vector search provides the tools to search over binary (images, audio or video) or text data: external tools convert that data to vectors (arrays of bytes or floats, also called "embeddings"), which are then used for indexing and queries in Hibernate Search. Hibernate Search introduces a new field type — @VectorField and a new predicate knn, so that the vectors can be indexed and then searched upon.

Vector fields can work with vector data represented as byte or float arrays in the documents. Out of the box byte[] and float[] property types will work with the new field type. For any other entity property types, a custom value bridge or value binder should be implemented. Keep in mind that indexed vectors must be of the same length and that this length should be specified upfront for the schema to be created:

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Book {

        @Id
        private Integer id;

        @VectorField(dimension = 512)
        private float[] coverImageEmbeddings;

        // Other properties ...
}

Searching for vector similarities is performed via a knn predicate:

float[] coverImageEmbeddingsVector = /*...*/

List<Book> hits = searchSession.search( Book.class )
.where( f ->
    // provide the number of similar documents to look for:
    f.knn( 5 )
        // the name of the vector field:
        .field( "coverImageEmbeddings" )
         // matched documents will be the ones whose indexed vector
         // is "most similar" to this vector
        .matching( coverImageEmbeddingsVector )
    // additionally an optional filter can be supplied
    // to provide a regular fulltext search predicate
    .filter( f.match().field( "authors.firstName" ).matching( "arthur" ) )
).fetchHits( 20 );

Note that each backend may have its own specifics and limitations with regard to the vector search. For more details look at the related documentation.

Looking up the capabilities of each field in the metamodel

It is now possible to see which capabilities (predicates/sorts/projections/etc.) are available for a field when inspecting the metamodel:

SearchMapping mapping = /*...*/ ;
// Retrieve a SearchIndexedEntity:
SearchIndexedEntity<Book> bookEntity = mapping.indexedEntity( Book.class );
// Get the descriptor for that index.
// The descriptor exposes the index metamodel:
IndexDescriptor indexDescriptor = bookEntity.indexManager().descriptor();

// Retrieve a field by name
// and inspect its capabilities if such field is present:
indexDescriptor.field( "releaseDate" ).ifPresent( field -> {
        if ( field.isValueField() ) {
                // Get the descriptor for the field type:
                IndexValueFieldTypeDescriptor type = field.toValueField().type();
                // Inspect the "traits" of a field type:
                // each trait represents a predicate/sort/projection/aggregation
                // that can be used on fields of that type.
                Set<String> traits = type.traits();
                if ( traits.contains( IndexFieldTraits.Aggregations.RANGE ) ) {
                        // ...
                }
                if ( traits.contains( IndexFieldTraits.Predicates.EXISTS ) ) {
                        // ...
                }
                // ...
        }
} );

Query string predicate

The queryString predicate matches documents according to a structured query given as a string. It allows building more advanced query strings (using Lucene’s query language) and has more configuration options than a simpleQueryString predicate.

List<Book> hits = searchSession.search( Book.class )
    .where( f -> f.queryString().field( "description" )
        .matching( "robots +(crime investigation disappearance)^10 +\"investigation help\"~2 -/(dis)?a[p]+ea?ance/" ) )
    .fetchHits( 20 );

The query string, in this predicate, will result in a boolean query with 4 clauses:

  • a should clause matching robots;

  • two must clauses

    • another boolean query constructed from (crime || investigation || disappearance) string with a boost of 10

    • a query matching the phrase investigation help with the phrase slop equals to 2

  • a must not clause matching a regular expression (dis)?a[p]+ea?ance

    Note that each of the mentioned clauses may itself end up being translated into other types of queries.

See this section of the reference documentation on the queryString predicate for more information.

Simpler entity registration in the Standalone POJO mapper

Hibernate Search simplifies how entities can be defined. For standalone mapper now it is enough to annotate your entities with the @SearchEntity annotation.

@SearchEntity (1)
// ... Other annotations, e.g. @Indexed if this entity needs to be mapped to an index.
public class Book {

    @Id
    private Integer id;

    // Other properties ...
}
1 Annotate the type with @SearchEntity so it is treated as an entity.

Another update related to this is a way the SearchMappingBuilder builder is created. Now it requires an annotated type source to be provided.

CloseableSearchMapping searchMapping =
SearchMapping.builder( AnnotatedTypeSource.fromClasses( (1)
        Book.class, Associate.class, Manager.class ))
    .property( "hibernate.search.backend.hosts", "elasticsearch.mycompany.com" ) (2)
// ...
    .build(); (3)
1 Create a builder, passing an AnnotatedTypeSource to let Hibernate Search know where to look for annotations.

Thanks to classpath scanning, your AnnotatedTypeSource only needs to include one class from each JAR containing annotated types. Other types should be automatically discovered.

2 Set additional configuration properties.
3 Build the SearchMapping.

See this section of the reference documentation on the entity definition for more information.

What’s new compared to Hibernate Search 7.0.0.CR1

  • HSEARCH-5083: Upgrade to AWS SDK 2.24.1.

  • HSEARCH-5091: Upgrade to Elasticsearch client 8.12.2.

  • HSEARCH-5087: Add compatibility with OpenSearch 2.12.0.

  • HSEARCH-5039: Fix an issue with knn predicates that require multi-tenant filters.

  • HSEARCH-5088: Limit OpenSearch vector search capabilities to 2.9+ versions. While earlier versions of OpenSearch have already introduced the vector search capabilities, 2.9 is the first version where all features required for integration were introduced.

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.

Getting started, migrating

For new applications, refer to the getting started guide:

For existing applications, Hibernate Search 7.1 is a drop-in replacement for 7.0, assuming you also upgrade the dependencies. Information about deprecated configuration and API is included in the migration guide.

Feedback, issues, ideas?

To get in touch, use the following channels:


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