simple persistance layer on top of Solr

[Memory Makers <me...@gmail.com>]

Greetings guys,

I have been thinking of using Solr as a simple database due to it's
blinding speed -- actually I've used that approach in some projects with
decent success.

Any thoughts on that?

Thanks,

MM.

Re: simple persistance layer on top of Solr

[Memory Makers <me...@gmail.com>]

Well I want something beyond a key value store.

  I want to be able to free-text search documents
  I want to be able to retrieve documents based on other criteria

  I'm not sure how that would compare with something like MongoDB.

Thanks.

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Walter Underwood <wu...@wunderwood.org>wrote:

> Other than "it isn't a database"?
>
> If you want a key/value store, use one of those. If you want a full DB
> with transactions, use one of those.
>
> wunder
>
> On Nov 1, 2011, at 8:47 AM, Memory Makers wrote:
>
> > Greetings guys,
> >
> > I have been thinking of using Solr as a simple database due to it's
> > blinding speed -- actually I've used that approach in some projects with
> > decent success.
> >
> > Any thoughts on that?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > MM.
>
>
>
>
>
>

Re: simple persistance layer on top of Solr

[Walter Underwood <wu...@wunderwood.org>]

Other than "it isn't a database"?

If you want a key/value store, use one of those. If you want a full DB with transactions, use one of those.

wunder

On Nov 1, 2011, at 8:47 AM, Memory Makers wrote:

> Greetings guys,
> 
> I have been thinking of using Solr as a simple database due to it's
> blinding speed -- actually I've used that approach in some projects with
> decent success.
> 
> Any thoughts on that?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> MM.

Re: simple persistance layer on top of Solr

[Robert Stewart <bs...@gmail.com>]

It is not a horrible idea.  Lucene has a pretty reliable index now (it should not get corrupted).  And you can do backups with replication.

If you need ranked results (sort by relevance), and lots of free-text queries then using it makes sense.  If you just need boolean search and maybe some sort of joins or aggregate functions, maybe some other NoSQL solution would be better (more flexible query language, etc.).

Also, see these links:

http://www.lucidimagination.com/blog/2010/04/30/nosql-lucene-and-solr/

and

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3215029/nosql-mongodb-vs-lucene-or-solr-as-your-database

Bob

On Nov 1, 2011, at 11:47 AM, Memory Makers wrote:

> Greetings guys,
> 
> I have been thinking of using Solr as a simple database due to it's
> blinding speed -- actually I've used that approach in some projects with
> decent success.
> 
> Any thoughts on that?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> MM.

Re: simple persistance layer on top of Solr

[Mikhail Garber <mi...@garbercentral.com>]

This is very good idea and I used it several times over the years with
great success. As long as you understand limitations (global
transactions, not being able to "update" records, ...)


On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 8:47 AM, Memory Makers <me...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings guys,
>
> I have been thinking of using Solr as a simple database due to it's
> blinding speed -- actually I've used that approach in some projects with
> decent success.
>
> Any thoughts on that?
>
> Thanks,
>
> MM.
>

Re: simple persistance layer on top of Solr

[Memory Makers <me...@gmail.com>]

Well,

I've done a lot of work with MySQL and content management systems -- and
frankly whenever I have to integrate with Solr or do some Lucene work I am
amazed at the speed -- even when I index web pages for search -- MySQL
pales by comparison when data sets get large (2> million rows)

Thanks,

MM.

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Robert Stewart <bs...@gmail.com>wrote:

> One other potentially huge consideration is how "updatable" you need
> documents to be.  Lucene only can replace existing documents, it cannot
> modify existing documents directly (so an update is essentially a delete
> followed by an insert of a new document with the same primary key).  There
> are performance considerations here as well (how to do bulk updates
> quickly, etc.).
>
> Bob
>
>
> On Nov 1, 2011, at 11:47 AM, Memory Makers wrote:
>
> > Greetings guys,
> >
> > I have been thinking of using Solr as a simple database due to it's
> > blinding speed -- actually I've used that approach in some projects with
> > decent success.
> >
> > Any thoughts on that?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > MM.
>
>

Re: simple persistance layer on top of Solr

[Robert Stewart <bs...@gmail.com>]

One other potentially huge consideration is how "updatable" you need documents to be.  Lucene only can replace existing documents, it cannot modify existing documents directly (so an update is essentially a delete followed by an insert of a new document with the same primary key).  There are performance considerations here as well (how to do bulk updates quickly, etc.).

Bob


On Nov 1, 2011, at 11:47 AM, Memory Makers wrote:

> Greetings guys,
> 
> I have been thinking of using Solr as a simple database due to it's
> blinding speed -- actually I've used that approach in some projects with
> decent success.
> 
> Any thoughts on that?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> MM.