Chris Hostetter wrote:
> I'm going to sidestep the issue of wether there *was* a good reason for
> it, as well as the "does the singleton pattern make sense for the current
> usage" question and answer what i think is an equally significant
> question: "what are the implications of trying to change it now?" ... the
> biggest i can think of being that SolrConfig is also a static singleton,
> and a *lot* of code in the Solr code base would need to be changed to
> support multiple SolrConfigs ... and without multiple SolrConfigs, there
> really isnt' any reason to have multiple SolrCores.
This actually underlines that my guess was right to a certain extent.
Changing from singleton is not straightforward.
I am currently in the startup phase of my thesis regarding open source
and enterprise search. After having worked at perhaps the leading major
enterprise search company, I have the impression that multiple
collections is a very common feature (and very sought-after). It is a
trend I see not just directly from my work, but most certainly also as a
result of enterprise search solutions becoming more common in general.
However I must say that Solr seems to be approaching the problem from a
very logical angle. What really is missing is a more abstract layer,
call it application framework, that probably will come afterwards
anyway. This will perhaps evolve naturally as part of the Solr project
at a later stage, or perhaps even as a separate open source project
building on Solr.
Until this framework is available with its appropriate configuration
files, administrator interface and so on in place, it seems a bit
unnatural to support multiple collections from the same application
instance.
Bottom line (for now): I think that users looking for enterprise search
solutions must have a simple way of creating multiple collections from
within the same application.
I apologize for my very philosophical e-mail, but I tend to become
somewhat visionary and conceptual after a few beers, and this might not
be the perfect forum for these discussions(?) :)
Eivind
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