Windows Azure support for Solr 4.0 Announced

Check out a blog post by Microsoft Open Technologies announcing Solr 4.0 support on Windows Azure.

Solr 4.0 dramatically improves scalability, performance, and flexibility. An overhauled Lucene underneath sports near real-time (NRT) capabilities allowing indexed documents to be rapidly visible and searchable. Lucene’s improvements also include pluggable scoring, much faster fuzzy and wildcard querying, and vastly improved memory usage. Solr 4.0 is the first release to use the shared 4.x branch for Lucene & Solr.

These Lucene improvements automatically make Solr much better, and Solr magnifies these advances with “SolrCloud.” SolrCloud enables highly available and fault tolerant clusters for large scale distributed indexing and searching. SolrCloud allows you to scale a single index via replication over multiple Solr instances running multiple SolrCores for massive scaling and redundancy.

Lucidworks Search now also supports and enhances Solr/Lucene 4.0 and adds in additional features such as user management, extensive connectors, click-scoring to improve results, and wraps it all up in one easy to use, web-based bundle.

Want to get started on Windows Azure and try out Lucidworks Search based on the new Solr/Lucene 4.0? Visit here and pick the option that best suits your needs.