In our application, we index educational resources and allow searching for them. We allow our customers to change some of the non-textual metadata associated with a resource (like booklevel, interestlevel etc) to serve their users better. So for each resource, in theory it could have different set of metadata values for each customer, but in reality may be 10 - 25% of our customers customize a small portion of the resources.
Our current solution uses SQL Server to manage the customizations (the database is sharded for other reasons as well) and also uses SQL Server's Full Text index for search. We are replacing this with Solr. There are few approaches we had thought about, but none of them seem ideal a) Duplicate the entries in Solr. Each resource would be replicated for each customer and there would be an index entry/customer. The number of index entries is an big concern even though the text field values are the same. (We have about 300K resources and about 50K customers and both will grow) b) Use a dedicated solr core for each customer. This wouldn't be using resources efficiently and we would be duplicating textual components which doesn't change from customer to customer. c) Use a Global index that has the resources with default values and then use a separate index for each customer that contains resources that are customized This requires managing lot of small cores/indexes. Also this would require merging results from multiple cores, so don't think this will work d) Use solr to do the text search and do Post Processing to filter based on metadata externally -- as you can imagine, this have all the challenges associated with post processing (pagination support, etc) e) Use Advanced/Post filtering Solr support --- Even if we can figure out a reasonable way to cache the lookup for metadata values for each customer, not sure if this would be efficient Any other recommendations on solutions. -- View this message in context: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Indexing-different-customer-customized-field-values-tp4102000.html Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
