With Solr's atomic updates, optimistic locking, update log, openSearcher=false on commits, etc. you can definitely do this.
Biggest question in my mind is whether you're willing to accept Solr's emphasis on consistency vs. write-availability? With a db like Cassandra, you can achieve better write-availability by giving up a little on the consistency side. With Solr, you don't have that choice - writes must succeed on the shard leader and replicas. With the tlog, Solr still does pretty good here. The other concern is how frequently (and how many) are you updating data in existing docs? Solr has to delete and re-index the entire doc after updating a single field. We abuse Solr with millions of atomic updates daily but it's not anywhere near as fast as you get with database updates. Lastly, have you seen Yonik's slides from Apache Eurocon - great read if not: http://vimeopro.com/user11514798/apache-lucene-eurocon-2012/video/55387447 Cheers, Tim On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 10:02 PM, jimtronic <jimtro...@gmail.com> wrote: > Now that I've been running Solr Cloud for a couple months and gotten > comfortable with it, I think it's time to revisit this subject. > > When I search for the topic of using Solr as a primary db online, I get lots > of discussions from 2-3 years ago and usually they point out a lot of > hurdles that have now largely been eliminated with the release of Solr > Cloud. > > I've stopped using the standard method of writing to my db and pushing out > periodically to solr. Instead, I'm writing simultaneously to solr and the db > with less frequent syncs from the database just to be safe. I find this to > be much faster and easier than doing delta imports via the DIH handler. In > fact, it's gone so smoothly, I'm really wondering why I need to keep writing > it to the db at all. > > I've always got several nodes running and launching new ones takes only > minutes to be fully operational. I'm taking frequent snapshots and my test > restores have been painless and quick. > > So, if I'm looking at other NoSQL solutions like MongoDB or Cassandra, why > wouldn't I just use Solr? It's distributed, fast, and stable. It has a great > http api and it's nearly schema-less using dynamic fields. And, most > importantly, it offers the most powerful query language available. > > I'd really like to hear from someone who has made the leap. > > Cheers, Jim > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/SolrCloud-as-my-primary-data-store-tp4041774.html > Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
