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Solr 8.6.1

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Weirdly I still find Solr easier to use then ES. Solrs's bulk import has csv support out of the box instead of converting it to json first and increasing its size and payload a lot. The query DSL is way easier and better documented I find. And it tends not to break all the time between releases. I moved a couple of times from Solr to Es and back again. SOLR comes with a tiny admin that you can just use OOB and use to fire your queries against instead of choosing another frontend, configuring and setting that up etc. I find solr's experience way easier and lower ceremony after all.

It’s also amazing how versatile solr is - I’ve used as both an embedded search lib in an tool as well as a multi region distributed replicated cluster in large scale prod environments, all from pretty much the same distribution.

Could you speak more about using solr as a primary DB? Or did I misunderstand how you were using it?

you can, but almost nobody will recommend to use it, neither will do with elasticsearch. In most cases it works, but it has priorized speed over resilience, so it's better to have a source from where you can rebuild the index.

> it's better to have a source from where you can rebuild the index.

Having worked for several years at a company selling search, I can't emphasize this enough. Rebuilding indices should always be straightforward, and your data should be very accessible in some other (preliminary) form. We ran into so many issues, and had so many panics, because the index had become the only place some things existed. It's also way easier to tweak (read: optimize) your schema over time when you're in the habit of rebuilding the index.

Another "but" here is what [0] may happen if you're storing personal data in big indexes...

TLDR; In some cases, what data you actually have (as in "on disk") becomes complicated. For instance, in some cases, once a segment reaches max size (5GB by default) it will only be eligible for merging when it accumulates 50% deletions. This means you might not be able to guarantee deletion of data within 30 days (in accordance with the GDPR).

[0]: https://www.eivindarvesen.com/blog/2018/09/23/lucene-indexes...

Solr is great, but it's frustratingly unopinionated about a lot of things.

Should you use SolrCloud or Solr standalone mode? Use the classic config files? Or dynamic/managed schemas and config APIs?

You may say "to each their own" but when you want to do a simple thing, like install a plugin, and there's about 5 ways to do it - with each way working for a different 75% of use cases, it can be rather frustrating. Compare this to Elasticsearch where there's one company behind everything (for better or worse) with very strict and clear opinions about how to do something.

I'm working on a little project with my personal opinions for Solr use. Call it Effective Solr, or Solr The Good Parts. Who knows when/if it'll get done, and they're my somewhat informed opinions, but maybe someone would find them useful.

It's rather early, but it never hurts to begin gathering comments on this

https://gist.github.com/softwaredoug/3212fa9c5a198a565a9a77b...

Solr is amazing and I wish there was more buzz around it

Solr is one of those technologies which works but isn't really glorious to use and is bit stuffy with its XML configurations and Java interfaces. It's a bit of shame, because search engines are so popular nowadays and everybody seems to be fixated on using ElasticSearch. Which from what I've read and heard is resource-hungry and not really cut for simple text-search.

Maybe someday somebody will create a new search engine that will be hipster and easy to use, like Algolia but open-source. I'm bit curious though how incumbent Lucene is as the core search engine that it would even make sense to try and recreate it in another language. Probably too much that unless somebody has money to throw around it will remain so to the far future.

And the need for ZooKeeper with SolrCloud. We had to have at least one person working full time to keep a decent sized cluster working correctly.

This mirrors my experience. The Solr Cluster that we have in production requires full time attention of our infrastructure team.

I had an opposite experience: solr was rock solid and didn’t require too much maintenance.

Never bothered with solr cloud and our simple replicated cluster that pretty much auto scales from 3 nodes to 100+ across multiple regions takes maybe a few hours of maintenance every few months, and no one dedicated to baby sit it...

In summary, avoid SolrCloud like plague.

Search really has 3 main levels.

1. Core ranked inverted index data store (Lucene)

2. API layer on top of Lucene with easier query, index, data importing, sharding, etc. (Solr/Elastic Search)

3. Fully hosted API / UI for easier GUI for developers and search relevance engineers (Algolia, Lucidworks Fusion).

The new hotness in search is currently Rust-based tooling. Rust is a great application for search as it's very performance-sensitive and data-structure heavy, and once the indexes are built are fairly stable, leading to the 90th+ percentile latencies and throughput to be much better than Lucene-based libraries that are built on top of the JVM.

For the low level core search engine like Lucene (inverted indexes, TF-IDF ranking, etc), there's Tantivy [1]

For the middle tier (ES) there's Sonic [2]

MeiliSearch [3] is a play for the hipster open-source Algolia. It's in Rust, is MIT licensed, supports self-hosting, has an out of the box web interface.

[1] https://github.com/tantivy-search/tantivy [2] https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic [3] https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch

Cool, very interesting! Thanks for the summary, I had/have a project that currently uses Solr for quick text search yet the integration has not been totally painless. Also it's kind of ridiculous how much RAM even the tiniest instance uses.

I myself picked up Solr (instead of ES) as it was recommended as better bet for my use case but I did not research in full what others options there were.

Rust seems like a smart choice like it probably is for this type of very fast processing. I guess this is yet another reason to learn it.

I also found a nice overview in the MeiliSearch documentation [1]. Maybe, you find it interesting.

[1] https://docs.meilisearch.com/resources/comparison_to_alterna...

I remember load testing both ES and Solr about 3 years ago. What was tested was the indexing of randomly generated 500 word documents and keyword based search. When it came to indexing, Solr was faster but ES had better throughput. When it came to querying, Solr was the clear winner.

https://glennengstrand.info/software/performance/elasticsear...

I tend towards the rule of thumb that if you want search, Solr is what you use, if you want logging, ElasticSearch is the way to go.

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-announce/202008... Apache Lucene 8.6.1 released

Does Solr have what the HFT guy calls 'catastrophic typing' in ES?

https://thehftguy.com/2020/08/04/the-differences-between-spl...

Yes, since you have to define the type of each field. If you have a managed schema (=you don't define a schema but let SolR auto-create it), SolR will pick the type for you. Any document with a field not matching the type will be rejected.

https://linuxsecurity.com/advisories/deblts/debian-lts-dla-2...

More canonical source:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/08/msg0002...

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