It is time for the last Solr Digest of 2010; the next Digest will be published some time in January 2011. This was not a month with too many interesting developments, so here we bring to your attention only the few more interesting bits. Here we go…
Already committed features
- Anyone working with Polish language will be happy to hear that factory for Polish stemmer is committed to 3_x and trunk.
Interesting features in development
- Ever had problems with Solr’s sharding when one of the shards fails? One interesting patch that will help you in such cases is attached to JIRA issue Solr should be able to keep on truckin’ if a shard fails during a distributed search. Nice issue name, ha? Another old issue also related to this problem is Return partial results when a connection to a shard is refused also contains a patch. We didn’t try them patches, but one of them should be suitable if you experience problems like this.
- Work is being done on Improve analyzer/version handling in Solr. In the future, this should notify users about things like deprecated or old version of APIs they currently use and that will be removed in the future versions. Check out this JIRA issue for more details.
Miscellaneous
- A fix for a feature that was committed earlier this year – Enable sorting by Function Query – is close to being committed. This is big one! There were some problems with it: functions weren’t weighted, function query wasn’t being properly parsed, some deprecated bits of code were used, etc. Patch is already posted, so if you are eager to use this functionality you can start by applying the patch yourself.
- If you’re thinking about using NRT (near-real time) search capabilities of future Solr 4.0, some food for thoughts may be found in this ML thread – Possibilities of (near) real time search with solr.
- Many people are using Spatial Search features recently introduced in Solr. If you’re considering that too, be careful about one limitation: there is no Spatial support for multi-valued fields. So, if you have multi-valued spatial fields and you’d like to do some sorting on them, you’ll end up with incorrect results. The feature we’re describing here can be found in some other search tools, though, like Elastic Search, so Solr might be getting it too some day. You can check if there is some progress with this in JIRA issues like SOLR-2154
- There is a major bug in DataImportHandler – it doesn’t release JDBC connections. It appears that this issue isn’t related to any particular database, so this is an obvious bug in DIH. Check this JIRA issue for updates.
- If you prefer git over svn, you might be interested in Solr’s git repository recently set up. Check this ML thread to learn more about it.
So long until 2011, Solr Digest readers! Follow @sematext on Twitter for other stuff from Sematext.