Hi all, I've been tasked with evaluating whether Solr is the right solution for my company's search needs. If this isn't the right forum for this kind of question, please let me know where to go instead!
We are currently using sql queries to find mysql db results that match a single keyword in one short text field, so our search is pretty crude. What we hope that Solr can do initially is: 1 enable more flexible search (booleans, more than one field searched/matched, etc) 2 live search results (eg new records get added to the index upon creation) 3 search rankings (eg most relevant -> least relevant) 4 categorize our db (take records and at least group them, better if it could assign a label to each record) 5 locate nearby results (geospatial search) What I hope you can advise on is: A How would you go about #2 - making sure that new documents are added/indexed asap, based on a new rows to the db? Is that as simple as a setting in Solr, or does it take some coding (eg a listener object, a kron job, etc.). I tried looking at the wiki & tutorial but wasn't able to find answers - I couldn't make sense of how to use UpdateRequestProcessor to do it. (http://wiki.apache.org/solr/UpdateRequestProcessor) B What's the status of document clustering? The wiki says it's not been fully implemented. Would we be able to achieve any of #4 yet? If not, what else should we consider? C Would you use Solr over say Google Maps api to run location aware searches? D How long should we expect it to take to configure Solr on our servers with our db, get the initial index set up, and enable live search results? Are we talking one week, or one month? Our db is not tiny, but it's not huge - say around 8k records in each of ~20 tables. Most tables have around 10 fields, including at least one large text field and then a variety of dates, numbers, and small text. I really appreciate any advice you can offer! Cheers, Becky http://www.coffeeandpower.com
