I believe that should work fine in Solr 1.4.1. Creating a field with
just first letter of author is definitely the right (possibly only) way
to allow facetting on first letter of author's name.
I have very voluminous facets (few facet values, many docs in each
value) like that in my app too, works fine.
I get confused over the different facetting methods available in 1.4.1,
and exactly when each is called for. If you see initial problems, you
could try switching the facet.method and see what happens. You could
also try warming the caches with the results of facetting on this field
-- whether that matters or not (and how much RAM it takes) may depend on
the facetting method chosen, I get confused.
But, possibly with some tweaking of those things, I think your strategy
should work fine.
Jonathan
Alexandre Rocco wrote:
Guys,
We have a website running Solr indexing books, and we use a facet to filter
books by author.
After some time, we detected that this facet is very large and we need to
create some other feature to help finding the information.
Our product team asked to create a page that can show all authors by it's
initial letter, so we can distribute this query easier.
Is it a feasible solution to create another field containing only the
initial letter for the authors? Using this approach we will be able to
filter the authors using this newly created field.
Do you think there will be any performance penalty on creating a couple of
fields with the initial letter of these other fields (author, publisher)?
I guess that this approach is way easier than other solutions we came up
with.
Am I missing other alternatives?
Thanks,
Alexandre
