Re: Use of Solr as primary store for search engine

[Shawn Heisey]

On 7/4/2012 1:54 AM, Amit Nithian wrote:
I am curious to know how people are using Solr in conjunction with
other data stores when building search engines to power web sites (say
an ecommerce site). The question I have for the group is given an
architecture where the primary (transactional) data store is MySQL
(Oracle, PostGres whatever) with periodic indexing into Solr, when
your front end issues a search query to Solr and returns results, are
there any joins with your primary Oracle/MySQL etc to help render
results?

We used to pull almost everything from our previous search engine. 
Shortly after we switched to Solr, we began deploying a new version of 
our website which pulls more from the original data source.  The current 
goal is to only store just enough data in Solr to render a search result 
grid (pulling thumbails from the filesystem), but go to the database and 
the filesystem for detail pages.  We'd like to reduce the index size to 
the point where the whole thing will fit in RAM, which we hope will also 
reduce the amount of time required for a full reindex.

What I hope to gain out of upgrading to Solr 4: Use the NRT features so 
that we can index item popularity and purchase data fast enough to make 
it actually useful.

Thanks,
Shawn