FAST is a little less flexible (no dynamic fields) and not programmable at the Lucene level.
We recently switched from FAST to Solr because of cost reasons. They did not know how to license us; they are used to, say, IBM running FAST on hundreds of servers. We are a startup with very specific needs. It's turned out to be worthwhile because we only want to do one thing really well and we can customize Solr for it. Lance -----Original Message----- From: Nuno Leitao [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 5:51 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: SOLR X FAST FAST uses two pipelines - an ingestion pipeline (for document feeding) and a query pipeline which are fully programmable (i.e., you can customize it fully). At ingestion time you typically prepare documents for indexing (tokenize, character normalize, lemmatize, clean up text, perform entity extraction for facets, perform static boosting for certain documents, etc.), while at query time you can expand synonyms, and do other general query side tasks (not unlike Solr). Horizontal scalability means the ability to cluster your search engine across a large number of servers, so you can scale up on the number of documents, queries, crawls, etc. There are FAST deployments out there which run on dozens, in some cases hundreds of nodes serving multiple terabyte size indexes and achieving hundreds of queries per seconds. Yet again, if your requirements are relatively simple then Lucene might do the job just fine. Hope this helps. --Nuno. On 12 Dec 2007, at 01:33, Ravish Bhagdev wrote: > Could you please elaborate on what you mean by ingestion pipeline and > horizontal scalability? I apologize if this is a stupid question > everyone else on the forum is familiar with. > > Thanks, > Ravi > > On Dec 12, 2007 1:09 AM, Nuno Leitao <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Depends, if you are looking for a small sized index (gigabytes rather >> than dozens or hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes) with relatively >> simple requirements (a few facets, simple tokenization, English only >> linguistics, etc.) Solr is likely to be appropriate for most cases. >> >> FAST however gives you great horizontal scalability, out of the box >> linguistics for many languages (including CJK), contextual and scope >> searching, a web, file and database crawler, programmable ingestion >> pipeline, etc. >> >> Regards. >> >> --Nuno >> >> >> On 11 Dec 2007, at 22:09, William Silva wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> How is the best way to compare SOLR and FAST Search ? >>> Thanks, >>> William. >> >>
