[ckan-dev] solr

Thu May 19 08:27:10 UTC 2011

Hi Seb,

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 7:10 PM, Seb Bacon <seb.bacon at okfn.org> wrote:
> Friedrich, would love to hear more detail, as those reasons also
> pertain to postgres, no?!

This is a good question, there were a few reasons for integrating with Solr:

* It runs in a seperate server and (if we decide to drop the
psql-specific backend) keeps a lot of the complexity out of our
system.
* It supports advanced query/pipeline processing: we can customize
tokenization, synonyms, stopwords.
* Full query language with boolean ops etc.
* Facets, more-like-this, etc. All built in.

I will stop quoting Solr feature sheets now, point is: it does a lot
of nice things. Postgres FTS doesn't, especially field queries were
unebelievably ugly when I started working on this and they still are.

Other options we discussed at the time were using the Haystack
framework or Xapian directly; Solr just seemed the best bet.

- Friedrich