Federated Search

[Tim Patton]

I just downloaded Solr to try out, it seems like it will replace a ton 
of code I've written.  I saw a few posts about the FederatedSearch and 
skimmed the ideas at http://wiki.apache.org/solr/FederatedSearch.  The 
project I am working on has several Lucene indexes 20-40GB in size 
spread among a few machines.  I've also run into problems figuring out 
how to work with Lucene in a distributed fashion, though all of my 
difficulties were in indexing, searching with Multisearcher and a few 
custom classes on top of the hits was not that difficult.

Indexing involved using a SQL database as a master db so you could find 
documents by their unique ID and a JMS server to distribute additions, 
deletions and updates to each of the indexing servers.  I eventually 
replaced the JMS server with someone custom I wrote that is much more 
lightweight, and less prone to bogging down.

I'd be curious if Yonik was still on the list and if he or anyone had 
any new ideas for Federated Searching.

Tim P.