With ElasticSearch, an app can point to the alias of an index, instead of the index directly, which makes it easy to switch the index the app uses.
Tire, the equivalent of Sunspot for ES, allows me to interact with aliases.
I can't find anything regarding aliases with Sunspot. How do you handle them in your apps which use Sunspot?
I do not know anything about sunspot, but for Solr counts that there has been a core alias feature, until version 3.1 of Solr. This has been removed with SOLR-1637 and has been "really, really" removed with SOLR-6169 in version 4.9.
But with the advent of SolrCloud this feature has been re-introduced with a better/different implementation SOLR-4497 in Solr 4.2.
Unfortunately when skimming through the Reference of Sunspost I do not find a word about SolrCloud or aliasing. Probably that features have not been adopted by the Sunspot developers? As stated I do not know sunspot, probably they name it differently?
Most likely you will have to get your hands dirty and manage SolrCloud and in consequence aliases not through the API sunspot offers, but with admin interface of Solr.
Sources of information
There is this old Wiki page that covers SolrCloud. It has a small, separate section about creating aliases
In the official reference is also a section about collection aliases.
The guys of Cloudera who have donated the feature to Solr have also written a blog post about it.
Related
ElasticSearch has percolator for prospective search. Does SOLR have a similar feature where you define your query upfront? If not, is there an effective way of implementing this myself on top of the existing SOLR features?
besides what BunkerMentality said, it is not hard to build your own percolator, what you need:
Are the queries you want to run easy to model on Lucene only syntax? if so you are good, if not, you need to convert them to Lucene only. Built them, and keep them in memory as Lucene queries
When a doc arrives:
build a MemoryIndex containing only that single doc
run all your queries on the index
I have done this for a system ingesting millions docs a day and it worked fine.
It's listed as an open new feature, SOLR-4587, on Solr JIRA but it doesn't seem like any work has started on it yet.
There is a link in the comments there to a separate project called Luwak that seems to implement some features similar to percolator.
If it is still relevant, you can use this
It's SOLR Update Processor that based on Luwak
I have found the interesting article on Solr Facet Functions available in heliosearch.
I am just wondering if the same is available in native solr?
That kind of functionality will come with SOLR 5.1. Yonik, the developer of Heliosearch, joined a big SOLR company. Development on Heliosearch will not continue, but Yonik is porting the changes to SOLR. See the following thread for details:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/heliosearch/ji466TddEDY
I don't think here are facet/aggregate functions like that. The closest thing I've found is the stats component:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/The+Stats+Component
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Faceting#Faceting-CombiningStatsComponentWithPivots
I think the title is self-explanatory.
I don't see anything on the Apache Solr wiki that suggests you can maintain the schema of an Apache Solr instance using the ReST API, but maybe (hopefully) you know something I don't.
I just found a section on the Solr wiki where they describe this exact feature for release 4.4 (which is not released yet).
It does have some prerequisite configuration on the Solr instance, but it does allow you to add fields to the schema. Based on that information, I can't see why they won't eventually extend the functionality to allow you to delete as well. I guess we will have to wait and see.
Here is the link to that section: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SchemaRESTAPI#Adding_fields_to_a_schema. It also references this JIRA issue: "In preparation for dynamic schema modification via REST API, add a "managed" schema facility".
Are there any major differences between Solr 3.6 and Solr 4.0 other than new features? Am I safe using my existing queries (those that work in Solr 3.6) inside of Solr 4.0?
Are there any major differences between Solr 3.6 and Solr 4.0 other
than new features?
I find this question weird, least to say. Bug fixes and new features are the whole point of releases!
You can look at the full changelog of the Solr release which is a available here. Don't forget that Solr and Lucene are released in unison so you also need to look for relevant changes in both projects.
Am I safe using my existing queries (those that work in Solr 3.6)
inside of Solr 4.0?
Queries should be fine, but indices - probably not. Quoting javanna from another SO post:
The index format has changed, but Solr will take care of upgrading the
index. That happens automatically once you start Solr with your old
index. But after that the index cannot be read anymore by a previous
Solr/lucene version.
Ideally they should work.
You can probably check the Changes.txt which would give an idea of all the new features, Changes, Bug fixes, Optimization done.
If any things breaks, you can always refer to the Changes to check if any related has been changed.
I am rewriting our company's search functionality to use Solr instead of Compass. Our old code is using CompassQueryBuilder.CompassQueryStringBuilder to build a query out of a list of keywords. The keywords may have spaces in them: for example: "john smith", "tom jones".
Is there an existing facility I can use in Solr to replicate this functionality?
The closest thing I know for SolrJ is the solrj-criteria project. It seems to be currently unmaintained though.
Solr offers a wide variety of querying and indexing options. So fields that contain keywords with spaces in it, can be made possible by defining a custom type in the configuration file (see here). Queries with spaced keywords in it can be made possible by specifying a custom QueryParser. (see here)
Solr itself doesn't offer a QueryStringBuilder in an API. Actually, Solr itself doesn't offer any API classes at all, since all interaction is done by posting messages over Http. There are client libraries for Java, .NET and PHP etc. In the SolrNet api there exists a SolrMultipleCriteriaQuery, which is quite similar to the CompassQueryStringBuilder.