I'd run look into faceting and run a test. Create a schema, index the data and then run a query for *:* facteted by hotel to get a list of all the hotels you want followed by a query that returns all documents matching that hotel for your 2nd usecase.
You're probably still going to want a SQL database to catch the reservations made tho. in my experience implementing Solr is more work then implementing a normal SQL database, and loosing the relational part of a relational database is something you have to wrap your head around to see how it affects your application. That said solr on my 4 year old single core laptop outperforms our new dual xeon database server running IBM DB2 when it comes to running a query on a 10 million record dataset and retuning the total amount of documents that match. Once you get it up and running properly and you need querys that are like "give me the total number of documents that match these criteria, optionally facted by this and that" it's amazingly fast. Note that this advantage only becomes apparent when dealing with large data sets. anything under a coulpe 100k records (guideline, depends heavily on the type of record) and a normal SQL server should also be able to give you the results you need near instantly. Hope this helps ;) On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Carsten Kraus <carsten.kr...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm about to develop a travel website and am wondering if Solr might fit to > be used as the search solution. > Being quite the opposite of a db guru and new to Solr, it's hard for me to > judge if for my use-case a relational db should be used in favor of Solr(or > similar indexing server). Maybe some of you guys would share their opinion > on this? > > The products being searched for would be travel packages. That is: hotel > room + flight combined into one product. > I receive the products via a csv file, where each line defines a travel > package with concrete departure/return, accommodation and price data. > > For example one csv row might represent: > Hotel Foo in Paris, flight departing 10/10/09 from London, ending 10/20/09, > mealplan Bar, pricing $300 > ..while another one might look like: > Hotel Foo in Paris, flight departing 10/10/09 from Amsterdam, ending > 10/30/09, mealplan Eggs :), pricing $400 > > Now searches should show results in 2 steps: first step showing results > grouped by hotel(so no hotel appears twice) and second one all > date-airport-mealplan combinations for the hotel selected by the user in > step 1. > > From some first little tests, it seems to me as if I at least would need > the > collapse patch(SOLR-236) to be used in step 1 above?! > > What do you think? Does Solr fit into this scenario? Thoughts? > > Sorry for the lengthy post & thanks a lot for any pointer! > Carsten >
