I've been trying to create some small command line tools to exercise different parts of the Solr system.
In doing so I've been trying to load minimal cores and have had some limited success. For example, I've had some luck with CoreContainer and CoreDesriptor, getting a single core instance, etc. However, even after re-reading the wiki entries, I'm still not clear what is meant by "core". The info I find talks about administering multiple cores, which is nice, but doesn't really explain concisely what the core "is"? Presumably the base set of "stuff" that Solr needs to run. But, for example, is an instance directory with a valid solrconfig.xml and schema.xml a valid singular core? Or do you then need to register a core with an arbitrary name? For example, getCoreNames() gives an empty array, even after it's loaded a valid instance dir / config / schema. And does a core REQUIRE a process to come up on a port, even for an instant, or can you do some quick tests from the command line with a "static" core and not need to bind to a port? And can search operations be done "statically", without the use of TCP/IP port, like Lucene can? Do cores support this? And when moving from a single to multi core, how much extra configuration is needed? On the one extreme, do multiple cores require a completely separate instance dir, data dir and solrconfig? Or on the other end of the spectrum, maybe it's just a second process with a different "core" name, maybe on a secondary port? I really these must sound very "newb" to your hard core solr guys. Then there are the deprecated methods for instantiating cores. How "bad" is it to use those? And why were they changed? These are the types of things I'm a bit confused on. Is there an article or presenation that goes over some of this? Thanks all, Mark -- Mark Bennett / New Idea Engineering, Inc. / mbenn...@ideaeng.com
