On 12/30/2014 05:03 PM, Erick Erickson wrote:
I think that it would be _extremely_ helpful to have a bunch of "war stories" to reference. In my experience, people dealing with large numbers of documents really are most concerned with whether what they're doing is _possible_, and are mostly looking to see if someone else has "been there and done that". Of course they'd like all the specificity possible, but there's a lot of comfort in knowing something similar has been done before.
That's right. We deal with some pretty interesting use cases for banks. Some of them don't mind throwing hardware at a problem (some do).
One use case I can talk about is an archiving application. A customer calls in, asks about something, someone has to physically walk down to an archive, get a tape/cd/folder, plonk it in some ancient piece of hardware, and then rely on awful tools like windows file search to find whatever it is they were looking for.
No matter *how bad* Solr performance might get in the billions of documents on cheap and crappy hardware scale, it's *always* going to be better than the manual steps I just described. Even if it takes an hour to run, the value added by being able to search and report using structured & full-text search is immense.
