New Updates to Solr and Lucene

March 18, 2013

Apache Solr and Lucene are notable for good maintenance and frequent updates. These updates are one of the many reasons why Solr and Lucene are considered top choices in open source software. Another upgrade has just been announced in the default codec update 4.2. Read all the details in the article, “Apache Solr and Lucene 4.2 Update Default Codec Again.”

The article sums up some of the improvements:

“The Solr search platform now has a REST API which allows developers to read the schema; support for writing the schema is coming. DocValues are now integrated with Solr and as they allow faster loading and can use different compression algorithms, the integration offers a wide range of feature possibilities and performance benefits. Collections now support aliasing allowing for reindexing and swapping while in production, and the Collections API has now been improved to make it easier to ‘see how things turned out.’ It is also now possible to interact with a collection in a node even if it doesn’t have a replica on that node.”

The full details of the changes can be read in the Lucene 4.2 and Solr 4.2 release notes. When foundational software is improved, the value-added software attached to it gets an automatic upgrade as well. This is the case with LucidWorks and their suite of search offerings built upon the open source strength of Lucene and Solr. Interestingly, LucidWorks has been criticized for not having a RESTful API, but with the newest upgrade to Solr, the claim is no longer valid. LucidWorks will no doubt remain on top.

Emily Rae Aldridge, March 18, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Open source, Search

Comments

One Response to “New Updates to Solr and Lucene”

Andrew on March 22nd, 2013 7:03 am

We’ve written a blog post about our experience using solr 4.1 versus solr 4.2. Specifically we discuss the usage of the compression term frequency vectors, and the time/storage costs. It looks like a great feature which works right out of the box!

read more about it here: http://www.searchbox.com/solr-4-2-vs-solr-4-1-compressed-term-frequency-vectors/

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.