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Some thoughts on at least some of your questions: Field types: you'll probably want to index things like titles in two fields, one tokenized (text) and one not (string), so that you can retrieve and match the full title as well as searching for terms within it. See the way the Solr sample app uses "*_exact" fields. You can use the copyfield setting to avoid having to input the value twice. The same considerations affect whether you want to use multi-valued fields: if you're going to facet on that field, you want distinct values, not a concatenated series; if you're only going to do free term searching, the concatenation might not be a problem (though you risk getting matches on phrase searches like "James Miller" against the example you gave below). If you use boost on the date field the way you suggest, remember you'll have to reindex from scratch every year to adjust the boost as items age. The sample solrconfig.xml contains an example of date-wrangling to get the same effect based on distance from the current date, rather than hard-coding the boost into the index. The only point in interim commits is to make the new stuff available for searching. If you're just loading stuff into an index that isn't serving searches, there's no benefit to committing before everything is loaded; it just slows things down. Assuming your data structures are the same and you're not talking millions of records, I'd be inclined to put everything in one index to make cross-searching easier, assuming you want cross-searching. If you don't, there's no reason not to have multiple indexes. There is a way to pass Solr a path to a file that it can read from disk rather than posting the file. I hunted a bit in the wiki and couldn't find it, though; it may still be a patch you have to apply. Peter -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael Lackhoff Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 1:03 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [CODE4LIB] Getting started with SOLR Hello, I am just getting my feet wet with SOLR and have a couple of question how others have done certain things. I created a schema.xml where basically every field is of type "text" for the beginning. Do you use specialized types for authors or ISBNs or other fields? How do you handle multi-value fields? Do you feed everything in a single field (like "Smith, James ; Miller, Steve" as I have seen in a pure Lucene implementation of a collegue or do you use the multiValued feature of SOLR? What about boosting? I thought of giving the current year a boost="3.0" and then 0.1 less for every year the title is older, down to 1.0 for a 21-year-old book. The idea is to have a sort that tends to promote recent titles but still respects other aspects. Does this sound reasonable or are there other ideas? I would be very interested in an actual boosting-scheme from where I could start. We have a couple of databases that should eventually indexed. Do you build one huge database with an additional "database" field or is it better to have every database in its own SOLR instance? How do you fill the index? Our main database has about 700,000 records and I don't know if I should build one huge XML-file and feed that into SOLR or use a script that sends one record at a time with a commit after every 1000 records or so. Or do something in between and split it into chunks of a few thousand records each? What are your experiences? What if a record gives an error? Will the whole file be recjected or just that one record? Are there alternatives to the HTTP gateway? Are there any Perl-scripts around that could help? I built a little script that uses LWP to feed my test records into the database. It works but I don't have any error handling yet, very Quick and dirty XML creation so if there is something more mature I would like to use that. Any other ideas, further reading, experiences...? I know these are a lot of questions but after the conference last year I think there is lots of expertise in this group and perhaps I can avoid a few beginner mistakes with your help thanks in advance - Michael