Welcome to the second season of Sematext’s monthly Solr Digests. Once again, we compiled a list of most interesting topics in Solr world for the previous month:
Already committed features
- A bug related to using PHPSerialized response writer in sharded environment was fixed and committed in SOLR-2307. It affected all recent Solr versions (trunk, 3_x, 1.4.1,…) and the fix is committed to 3_x branch and trunk. In case you’re stuck with older version of Solr, you can manually try applying the patch, it should be doable.
- One old JIRA issue Enable sorting by Function Query is finally closed and committed to 3_x and trunk.
- A problem with race condition in StreamingUpdateSolrServer got its fixes before, however it appears that issue wasn’t fixed completely. Now another fix is committed to 3_x and trunk, so if you use this feature, we advise picking up the fix.
Interesting features in development
- Support for complex syntax (e.g. wildcards) in phrase queries is being brought to Lucene. In case you’re interested, you can take a look at LUCENE-1823 or LUCENE-1486 which was another try at similar functionality. These issues have been in development for a long time and still aren’t finished, although patches exist. Similar feature for Solr is developed under SOLR-1604, where you can also find some patches. However, we think it is a bit unclear if any of these issues will ever be committed to Lucene/Solr, so if you’re interested, check the progress on them occasionally and don’t hold your breath.
Interesting new features
- Solr might get improved per-field similarity integration into schema.xml. Currently, in Solr’s schema only global SimilarityProvider can be defined.
Miscellaneous
- Anyone having performance problems when using large start and rows parameters could benefit from looking at issue SOLR-2218. You can find some advice on how to deal with the problem using existing Solr capabilities.
- An interesting patch from issue Modify default solrconfig parameters via JMX aims to provide more flexibility in configuring Solr
- As usual, one common question is related to Solr/Lucene versions and release dates. In ML threads [Solr4.0] Release Date, Lucene 3.1 Release Proposal, Release schedule Lucene 4? and Is solr 4.0 ready for prime time? (or other ways to use geo distance in search) you can find more. In short, 3.1 is next version and might happen soon (March is being mention). 4.0 is a major release with many features not present in 3.1 and it is not likely that we will get it soon. Another ML thread provides insight into future release strategy.
- As usual, heated discussions are being held over Maven in Lucene/Solr world. If you’re interesting into reading what community thinks about Maven’s place in Lucene/Solr, we recommend reading (very long!) ML thread Let’s drop Maven Artifacts ! Discussions like this might eventually lead to Maven being dropped, and as a matter of fact, some sort of voting is already done in ML thread [POLL] Where do you get Lucene/Solr from? Maven? ASF Mirrors? where you can make your voice heard.
- A few interesting conferences are slowly approaching : Lucene Revolution 2011 is Coming – May 25 & 26 and Berlin Buzzwords 2011. Also, note that applications for Google’s Summer of Code must be submitted by the end of February.
And that’s all for January.