RE: Is Solr right for our project?

[Ephraim Ofir <Ep...@icq.com>]

The shards parameter can be added by the search handler if you configure it to do so, then the client doesn't have to know about it.  You can put your replicated shards behind a proxy/balancer which will check their health and that way fallback will be automatic.

Ephraim Ofir

-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Høydahl / Cominvent [mailto:jan.asf@cominvent.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 3:26 PM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Re: Is Solr right for our project?

Yes, in the latest released version (1.4.1), there is a shards= parameter but the client needs to fill it, i.e. the client needs to know what servers are indexers, searchers, shard masters and shard replicas...

The SolrCloud stuff is still not committed and only available as a patch right now. However, we encourage you to do a test install based on TRUNK+SOLR-1873 and give it a try. But we cannot guarantee that the APIs will not change in the released version (hopefully 3.1 sometime this year).

--
Jan Høydahl, search solution architect
Cominvent AS - www.cominvent.com

On 28. sep. 2010, at 10.44, Mike Thomsen wrote:

> Interesting. So what you are saying, though, is that at the moment it
> is NOT there?
> 
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 9:06 PM, Jan Høydahl / Cominvent
> <ja...@cominvent.com> wrote:
>> Solr will match this in version 3.1 which is the next major release.
>> Read this page: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrCloud for feature descriptions
>> Coming to a trunk near you - see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1873
>> 
>> --
>> Jan Høydahl, search solution architect
>> Cominvent AS - www.cominvent.com
>> 
>> On 27. sep. 2010, at 17.44, Mike Thomsen wrote:
>> 
>>> (I apologize in advance if I missed something in your documentation,
>>> but I've read through the Wiki on the subject of distributed searches
>>> and didn't find anything conclusive)
>>> 
>>> We are currently evaluating Solr and Autonomy. Solr is attractive due
>>> to its open source background, following and price. Autonomy is
>>> expensive, but we know for a fact that it can handle our distributed
>>> search requirements perfectly.
>>> 
>>> What we need to know is if Solr has capabilities that match or roughly
>>> approximate Autonomy's Distributed Search Handler. What it does it
>>> acts as a front-end for all of Autonomy's IDOL search servers (which
>>> correspond in this scenario to Solr shards). It is configured to know
>>> what is on each shard, which servers hold each shard and intelligently
>>> farms out queries based on that configuration. There is no need to
>>> specify which IDOL servers to hit while querying; the DiSH just knows
>>> where to go. Additionally, I believe in cases where an index piece is
>>> mirrored, it also monitors server health and falls back intelligently
>>> on other backup instances of a shard/index piece based on that.
>>> 
>>> I'd appreciate it if someone can give me a frank explanation of where
>>> Solr stands in this area.
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> 
>>> Mike
>> 
>>