At the end of October, I attended a 3-days Solr training. It was very interesting, in light of the former Elastic Search talk I attended mid-year. As an old Spring Data fan, when I found out Spring Data offered a Solr module, I jumped at the chance to try it. In this case, I’m well aware that an abstraction layer over Solr doesn’t mean we can easily change the underlying datastore.

I’ve recently begun diving into Search Engines in general and Solr in particular. This is my understanding of it so far. Why Solr? It isn’t really feasible to execute blazing fast search queries on very big SQL databases for 2 different reasons. The first reason comes SQL databases favoring lack of radiancy over performance. Basically, you’d need to use JOIN in your SELECT.