Migrating from Hibernate Search to Solr

[Ari King <ar...@gmail.com>]

I'm considering migrating from Hibernate Search to Solr, but in order
to make that decision, I'd appreciate insight on the following:

1. How difficult is getting Solr up and running? With Hibernate I had
to annotate a few classes and setup a config file; so it was pretty
easy.
2. How can/should one secure Solr?
3. From what I've read, Solr can work with NoSql databases. The
question is how well and how involved is the setup?

Thanks.

-Ari

Re: Migrating from Hibernate Search to Solr

[Ari King <ar...@gmail.com>]

> So no Hibernate/Solr glue out there already?   It'd be nice if you could use Hibernate as you do, but instead of working with the Lucene API directly it would     > use SolrJ.   If this type of glue doesn't already exist, then that'd be the first step I think.
>
> Otherwise, you could use Solr directly, but you'll likely be unhappy with the disconnect compared to what you're used to.  SolrJ supports annotations, but not to > the degree that Hibernate does, and even so you'd be left to create an indexer and to wire in updates/deletes as well.

How involved/difficult would you describe using Solr directly is? I
have no experience with Solr, but from what you described it doesn't
sound too bad.

-Ari

Re: Migrating from Hibernate Search to Solr

[Erik Hatcher <er...@gmail.com>]

On Nov 17, 2011, at 10:38 , Ari King wrote:

> I'm considering migrating from Hibernate Search to Solr, but in order
> to make that decision, I'd appreciate insight on the following:
> 
> 1. How difficult is getting Solr up and running? With Hibernate I had
> to annotate a few classes and setup a config file; so it was pretty
> easy.

So no Hibernate/Solr glue out there already?   It'd be nice if you could use Hibernate as you do, but instead of working with the Lucene API directly it would use SolrJ.   If this type of glue doesn't already exist, then that'd be the first step I think.

Otherwise, you could use Solr directly, but you'll likely be unhappy with the disconnect compared to what you're used to.  SolrJ supports annotations, but not to the degree that Hibernate does, and even so you'd be left to create an indexer and to wire in updates/deletes as well.

> 2. How can/should one secure Solr?

Secure it from what?  Being "secure" is relative, depends on what you're trying to protect from.  In general, no security needs to be applied directly to Solr, but certainly protect it behind a firewall and even block all IP access except to your application.

> 3. From what I've read, Solr can work with NoSql databases. The
> question is how well and how involved is the setup?

I imagine the specific nosql db's have their own Solr integration glue.  But in general, it's pretty trivial to iterate over a collection of objects and send them over to Solr in one way or another.

	Erik