New Packt book on Injecting Data into Solr

Instant Apache Solr Indexing Data How-To, by Alexandre Rafalovitch

Some pleasant surprises: only 90 pages (short is OK!), inexpensive ($6.39 eBook, $16.98 paperback), and includes coverage of Solr 4.3.  By covering a limited subject scope and not making this a giant volume, it’s more up to date.

I was happy to see it discuss commits, Atomic Updates and NRT (Near Real-Time) updates.

It also discusses supporting multiple languages, another thing I like to see.  However it doesn’t include coverage of Asian languages and going beyond the overly simple CJK analyzer.  But in fairness that’s a pretty big topic.

Other topics covered: working with Multiple Collections, using DIH (Data Import Handler) to import both XML files and Databases, UpdateRequestProcessors for CSV and JSON, Tika/Solr Cell, multi-value fields and copyField.

Though mostly an “operations” book (“edit this config, run that command”), it does include a short chapter on injecting data directly from Java via SolrJ.

I just got the book today, so I wouldn’t call this a review, but for $7 and a cursory review it looks like a good value.  My one hope is that they’ll update it again with info about the Schema API and Schemaless, when that’s all settled out.