Following up to our yesterday’s What’s New & What’s Fixed in Solr 1.4.1, here is a quick summary of some of the most visible changes that happened in Solr since Solr 1.4.0 release. All these changes are on Lucene/Solr’s trunk, which we don’t recommend using in serious production environments, unless you really love the bleeding edge (see Which Lucene or Solr Branch to Use).
So, What’s New in Solr 1.4.1? Great many things! According to @lucene, a total of 110 JIRA issues were resolved between Solr 1.4.0 and 1.4.1. If you have extra time on your hands, you can see all 110 issues in CHANGES.txt. If you don’t have lots of time, read our summary below:
- Solr trunk uses the index format that has been changed since Solr 1.4.0, so if you upgrade from 1.4.0 to trunk, you must reindex. Moreover, you must upgrade your slaves first, followed by the master upgrade.
- If you build Solr from the trunk today, you will see it’s at version 4.0 (4.0-dev to be more precise). It uses Lucene 4.0-dev (from trunk, of course).
- No more compressed fields – you have to compress them on your own before you add them. Inherited from Lucene.
- If you use Dismax and rely on its “mm” parameter, check CHANGES.txt for details, it’s been changed.
- Lots of work on Spatial Search and various function queries and distance measures has been done.
- New “edismax” (enhanced dismax) query parser was added. It addresses some of the frequently needed functionality missing from the old dismax (e.g. full Lucene syntax support, fielded queries, etc.).
- Spellchecker and Distributed Search now play well together. Hey, hey, if you care for Spellchecker/DYM and want to make sure your users never get “sorry, no matches, go fix your query” page, please see our DYM ReSearcher, you’ll love it! I know we love having it over on https://search-lucene.com/!
- If you use date facet ranges, you now have more control over inclusion/exclusion of upper/lower end points.
- You can specify percentages for cache autowarmCount, not just absolute numbers.
- If you prefer JSON over XML, you can now use JSON to add and delete documents, plus call the commit command.
- Facets got more optimization love.
- Bugfixes……lots of them.
- Last but not least, Solr also benefits from fixes and optimizations in the new Lucene versions. Lucene has much nicer CHANGES.txt.
These are the main changes, but numerous other ones are described in CHANGES.txt, including one new feature contributed by one of Sematext guys.