: partial update or a complete document. Under the hood a partial update : is a complete object anyway. Using partial updates you gain a little : bandwidth at the expense of additional stored fields.
FWIW: once SOLR-5944 lands in a released version, that won't always be true -- atomic updates on numeric fields that are docValues="true" and nothing else (stored=false, indexed=false) will use updatable docvalues under the covers and should be much more efficient then either reindexing the entire document, or the default atomic update codepath of re-indexing all fields from stored values. -Hoss http://www.lucidworks.com/
