Unofficial Solr Guide
This is the Unofficial Solr Guide
What is Solr?
Section titled “What is Solr?”Apache Solr is the popular, blazing fast, open source NoSQL search platform originally from the Apache Lucene Project.
Getting Started
Section titled “Getting Started”Solr is a snap to install - simply download and extract the .zip file!
Try this simple Solr Tutorial
Historical Note
Section titled “Historical Note”This document was written a long time ago (although links recently updated) before Solr’s documentation was well organized. Thanks to all the hard work by many Solr devs, there is now very good official documentation in the form of the Apache Solr Reference Guide!
Solr Features
Document oriented storage enables high scalability. Solr is data-format agnostic, and does is not tied to any particular serialization. Documents can be added to Solr in JSON, XML, CSV, or binary format. See this Solr Tutorial for an example of updating Solr with both JSON and CSV.
Split a big index across multiple machines and query it as if it were a single document collection.
There are no single points of failure. Documents are replicated to multiple nodes for fault-tolerance, high availability, and increased query scalability.
Atomic field modifiers for highly scalable document modification.
Versioning and conditionally updates based on document versions.
Dynamic category counting for search results. Solr lets you slice-and-dice on the fly! Also called guided navigation.
Also called “keyword in context”, this feature returns snippets of documents with matching query terms highlighted.
Find documents within a certain distance from a given point on Earth.
Solr uses Lucene as it’s primary index format to provide world class full-text search capabilities.
Although Solr is primarily document oriented, we recognize that certain database operations like JOIN can be the right tool for the job in some circumstances. This functionality selects a set of documents based on their relationship to a second set of documents. Also see related block-join / nested objects.
This feature limits the number of documents shown per category. For example, one could limit the number of website pages shown per domain or the number of pages shown per book.
Streaming Expressions in Solr are powerful building blocks for arbitrary distributed computation. This is also used to implement the powerful Parallel SQL capabilities.