Question

Solr supports updating, hence it is possible to develop a web app that stores all data within Solr. Is that a good idea?

Using just Solr, the user would update the Solr documents directly if they change something. For example, a user might edit a Recipe document to contain a new tag. This approach is good because the app simply has only one database.

Using two databases, the user updates the database as frequently as it needs to. Then, periodically the system updates the Solr index. This approach allows you to use the database technology to keep data consistent and doesn’t require any slow rebuilding of Solr indexes.

For my particular application, writes to the database will be infrequent.

Which approach makes the most sense and will lead to the most stable system?

Answer 1

If your updates in the db are infrequent, then doing a nightly delta import with DIH is easy, and it’s the typical way people use Solr (that is, not being the primary store for their data). There are some people that use Solr as their primary store too, but that is much more infrequent, though when 4.0 was released it contained some improvements that makes it easier to use it that way.