On 12 October 2012 fourth version of Apache Lucene and Solr search server has been released (more information). Today, after almost 2 and half year we can download the final release of 5 version of both Lucene library as well as Solr search server. The number of changes is pretty impressive and the next updates also sound interesting.
Some of the changes in Lucene library:
- File access from Lucene is always done using Java NIO.2 classes, which results in safer and more reliable library
- Each Lucene segment is given its own identifier making replication and its verification easier
- IndexWriter checks segments checksum before performing segments merge operation
- Heap memory usage has been lowered especially during segments merging thanks to new codec – Lucene50Codec
- FieldCache has been removed and moved to special class – sorting should be done on doc values fields from now
- New field type has been introduced – DateRangeField. It allows date range searches on multivalued fields
- ConcurrentMergeScheduler is now able to detect if its running on SSD drive and adjust itself is that’s true
- Added the possibility to choose between better compression or better performance for stored fields
Some of the changes in Solr search engine:
- Better usability of scripts and better examples
- Added scripts allowing starting and running Solr as Linux service
- Distributed IDF computation is now a fact
- Solr is no longer published as war file
- Collections API support added to SolrJ
- Ability to register new handlers using blob store API
- Replication throttling
- Changes and improvements from Lucene 5.0
The full list of changes in Lucene library is available at https://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/ReleaseNote50. Full list of changes in Solr search server is available at http://wiki.apache.org/solr/ReleaseNote50.
Apache Lucene library 5.0 can be downloaded from: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/java/. If you want to download Solr search server 5.0 go to http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/.