It is a pleasure to inform that the new version of the Lucene library and Solr search server has been released. It is the next release from the 8.x branch and it is numbered 8.6.0. This release introduces fixes for the bugs found in the previous versions along with new features.
Some of the changes introduced in the Lucene 8.6.0 library:
- API changes in SimpleFSDirectory, IndexWriterConfig, MergeScheduler and so on
- IndexWriter merge-on-commit feature introduced to merge small segments on commit to improve search performance by reducing the number of small segments
- Various optimizations and bug fixes
Some of the changes introduced in the Solr 8.6.0 search engine:
- Join queries can now work when using cross-collections even when they are sharded.
- Package manager got support for cluster level plugins
- Health check handler now requires all cores to be healthy before returning OK status
- New security related information in the admin panel
- Queries that don’t require exact results number have their performance improvement because of using BlockMax WAND algorithm
- Major redesign of the official Solr documentation is live
It is also very important that some of the Solr features are now marked as deprecated and will be removed in Solr 9.0. Those include:
- Data Import Handler
- HDFS Support
- Cross Data Center Replication
The decision was made after reviewing the code and getting to an agreement that the code for the above mentioned features to not meet the standards.
The full list of changes in the Apache Lucene library is available at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/LUCENE/ReleaseNote86, full list of changes in the Solr search engine is available at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SOLR/ReleaseNote86.
Apache Lucene library 8.6.0 can be downloaded from http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/java. If you want to download Solr search server 8.6.0 go to http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr.