> Your list has cool stuff but I think mostly can ship at whatever minor version. Solr has seen incremental progress over the years at minor releases.
If we don't ship headline grabbing features in a major release, we might as well abandon this project and dedicate our focus on building OpenSearch or Elasticsearch. We have had so many important features in Apache Solr introduced in some incremental release in 9.x. But, what is the perception among users about Solr's capabilities? I will not say here what I believe people think of Apache Solr in 2025, lest you or others shoot down the messenger of bad news, just to stay in a happy bubble. > FWIW I think Solr 11 is very likely to occur within a year following Solr > 10. Maybe that's the release of your dreams, but progress will be > incremental (delivering value sooner). It would be very unfortunate to let Apache Solr languish in a cesspool of mediocrity for an entire release cycle. On Fri, 5 Sept 2025 at 02:38, David Smiley <dsmi...@apache.org> wrote: > I suppose we all have our wish list of what we want the next major version > to have. I have mine (mostly geeky internal details BTW).... and as the > need to release draws near, I get more realistic as to what limited time > resources I'm going to spend on what topic. What can wait vs what "needs" > to happen at a major version boundary. For many existing Solr users, their > *pressing* needs will be met with up to date versions Java & Jetty & Lucene > -- all things present in Solr 10 right now. Your list has cool stuff but I > think mostly can ship at whatever minor version. Some highly wanted things > will come to 9.x. Solr has seen incremental progress over the years at > minor releases. The major releases are not that significant except for an > opportunity to break compatibility in some way. That is really important > for us stewarding a project that's been around for almost 20 years -- we > have to get rid of things or change things. > > FWIW I think Solr 11 is very likely to occur within a year following Solr > 10. Maybe that's the release of your dreams, but progress will be > incremental (delivering value sooner). > > On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 2:42 PM Ishan Chattopadhyaya < > ichattopadhy...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hi All, > > > > Here's my wishlist for Solr 10, to make Solr claw back the lost/losing > > mindshare amongst developers and AI practitioners. > > > > Here's what I think Solr 10 release should have (in addition to whatever > we > > already have): > > > > ** Vector Search / AI* > > - GPU based HNSW indexing > > - Local embeddings generation > > - Multi-vector fields > > - Visualization, metrics, recipes > > - Easy integration with storage and inference platforms like Sagemaker, > > Nemo, AWS S3 Vectors and everything else > > - Stretch goal: Global vectors indexing support (like IVF family of > > algorithms) > > - First party MCP support > > > > ** General* > > - Official client libraries in Python, Rust, Go, etc. > > - Something akin to Kibana / OpenSearch dashboards > > - A new modern UI with feature completeness > > - Entries in every meaningful AI leaderboard out there, preferably at par > > with other Lucene based search engines > > - Tons of more examples and live demos > > > > > > ** User experience *- Fix naming everywhere (if you know Solr, you know > > what I mean) > > - No confusion around various modes of Solr > > - Clear documentation of the API > > > > We may be able to achieve these, or we might not be able to. If we work > > towards these goals (or some of these), these should be achievable. We > will > > be in an excellent position with regard to earning back respect among the > > community and placing it at par or above search and AI engines. Solr 10 > is > > a great time to hit these goals. > > > > If someone has ideas (no matter how crazy, hard, or exploratory) on what > > else could be good to have, please help us with suggestions. > > > > Thanks and regards, > > Ishan > > > > > > [image: SearchScale] > > *Ishan Chattopadhyaya* > > *Search Consultant, SearchScale* > > > > is...@searchscale.com > > >
