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The following page has been changed by Lance Norskog: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/WhyUseSolr ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Assuming the user has a relational DB, why use Solr? If your use case requires a person to type words into a search box, you want a text search engine like Solr. - Databases and Solr have complementary strengths and weaknesses. SQL supports very simple wildcard-based text search with some simple normalization like matching upper case to lower case. The problem is that these are full table scans. In Solr all searchable words are stored in an "inverse index", which searches orders of magnitude faster. For a more complete description of Solr's features, see http://lucene.apache.org/solr/features.html (link) + Databases and Solr have complementary strengths and weaknesses. SQL supports very simple wildcard-based text search with some simple normalization like matching upper case to lower case. The problem is that these are full table scans. In Solr all searchable words are stored in an "inverse index", which searches orders of magnitude faster. For a more complete description of Solr's features, see [http://lucene.apache.org/solr/features.html]. ||||||<tablestyle="width: 80%">'''Solr v.s. Relational Database'''|| ||Lucene||<style="width: 30%;"> Solr ||<style="width: 30%; text-align: center;">Relational DB|| - ||Text Search||Very strong||Weak or Medium|| - ||Features||Few||Many|| + ||Text Search||Fast and sophisticated||Minimal and slow|| + ||Features||Few, targeted to text search||Many|| - ||Deployment Complexity||Medium||Low|| + ||Deployment Complexity||Medium||Medium|| - ||Administration Tools||Weak||Strong|| + ||Administration Tools||Minimal open source projects||Many open source & commercial|| ||Monitoring Tools||Weak||Very Strong|| - ||Scaling Tools||Medium||Strong|| + ||Scaling Tools||Automated, medium scale||Large scale|| ||Support Availability||Weak||Strong|| - ||Schema Flexibility||Rebuild||Immediate|| + ||Schema Flexibility||Must in general rebuild||Changes immediately visible|| ||Indexing Speed||Slow||Faster and adjustable|| - ||Query Speed||Fast||Medium|| + ||Query Speed||Text search is fast & predictable||Very dependent on design & use case|| ||Row Addition/Extraction Speed||Slow||Fast|| ||Partial Record Modification||No||Yes|| - ||Time between Addition and Query||Slow||Fast|| + ||Time to visibility after addition||Slow||Immediate|| - ||Access to internal data structures||High||Low|| + ||Access to internal data structures||High||None|| + ||Technical knowledge required||Java (minimal), web server deployment, IT||SQL, DB-specific factors, IT|| + ||Regular maintenance tasks|||||| From a database perspective, a Lucene index can be thought of as one DB table with very fast lookups and interesting enhancements for text search. This index is relatively expensive in space and creation time. Solr wraps this API with a full-featured front end, providing these additions:
