Although Jason has some valid points here, I'm with Yonik here. I do
believe that we've gotten used to the terms "core" to represent a single
index and "shard" to be represented by a single core. A "node" seems to
indicate a machine or a JVM. Changing any of these (informal perhaps)
definitions will only cause confusion. That's why I think a "slice" is a
good solution now... first it's a new term to a new view of the index
(logical shard AFAIK don't really exists yet) so people won't need to
get used to it, but it's also descriptive and intuitive. I do like
Jason's idea about having a protocol attached to the URL's.
Cheers,
Uri
Jason Rutherglen wrote:
But I've kind of gotten used to thinking of shards as the
actual physical queryable things...
I think a mistake was made referring to Solr cores as shards.
It's the same thing with 2 different names. Slices adds yet
another name which seems to imply the same thing yet again. I'd
rather see disambiguation here, and call them cores (partially
because that's what's in the code and on the wiki), and cores
only. It's a Solr specific term, it's going to be confused with
microprocessor cores, but at least there's only one name, which
as search people, we know creates fewer posting lists :).
Logical groupings of cores can occur, which can be aptly named
core groups. This way I can submit a query to a core group, and
it's reasonable to assume I'm hitting N cores. Further, cores
could point to a logical or physical entity via a URL. (As a
side note, I've always found it odd that the shards param to
RequestHandler lacks the protocol, what if I want to use HTTPS
for example?).
So there could be http://host/solr/core1 (physical),
core://megacorename (logical),
coregroup://supergreatcoregroupname (a group of cores) in the
"shards" parameter (whose name can perhaps be changed for
clarity in a future release). Then people can mix and match and
we won't have many different XML elements floating around. We'd
have a simple list of URLs that are transposed into a real
physical network request.
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Yonik Seeley
<yo...@lucidimagination.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Yonik Seeley
<yo...@lucidimagination.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Yonik Seeley
<yo...@lucidimagination.com> wrote:
I'm actually starting to lean toward "slice" instead of "logical shard".
Alternate terminology could be "index" for the actual physical lucene
lindex (and also enough of the URL that unambiguously identifies it),
and then "shard" could be the logical entity.
But I've kind of gotten used to thinking of shards as the actual
physical queryable things...
-Yonik
http://www.lucidimagination.com
