Unable to DELETE all documents in Solr4

Question

I have a Solr 4 index that I want to delete all its documents.

Attempt #1:

http://www.domain.com:8080/solr/collection1/update?stream.body=%3Cdelete%3E%3Cquery%3E*:*%3C/query%3E%3C/delete%3E

http://www.domain.com:8080/solr/collection1/update?stream.body=%3Ccommit/%3E

Result #1:

<response>
<lst name="responseHeader">
<int name="status">0</int>
<int name="QTime">0</int>
</lst>
</response>

Under the Solr Admin > collection 1, I still see Num Docs:829060! I suppose this means the delete query did not work.

I also see results when going to

http://www.domain.com:8080/solr/collection1/select?q=*%3A*&wt=xml

Attempt #2 Using Solarium PHP library

    // Create a client instance
    $config = array(
        'endpoint' => array(
            'localhost' => array(
                'host' => '127.0.0.1',
                'port' => 8080,
                'path' => '/solr/',
            )
        )
    );
    $client = new Solarium\Client($config);

    // get an update query instance
    $update = $client->createUpdate();

    // add the delete query and a commit command to the update query
    $update->addDeleteQuery('*:*');
    $update->addCommit();

    // this executes the query and returns the result
    $result = $client->update($update);

    echo '<b>Update query executed</b><br/>';
    echo 'Query status: ' . $result->getStatus(). '<br/>';
    echo 'Query time: ' . $result->getQueryTime();

Output #2:

Update query executed
Query status: 0
Query time: 3

I still see Num Docs:829060! This did not work as well.

Any ideas how to solve the problem?

UPDATE

I manually deleted the index folder /collection1/data, did a DIH full-import and still cant delete the documents in the new index. Any suggestions?

solrconfig.xml

<requestHandler name="/update" class="solr.UpdateRequestHandler">
  <!-- See below for information on defining 
       updateRequestProcessorChains that can be used by name 
       on each Update Request
    -->
  <!--
     <lst name="defaults">
       <str name="update.chain">dedupe</str>
     </lst>
     -->
</requestHandler>

phisch phisch · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-07T15:05:48

Can you try and query solr on the command line? Eg:

curl http://domain.com:8080/solr/collection1/update?commit=true -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --data-binary '<delete><query>*:*</query></delete>'

After running this query you should see something like

INFO: [phisch-dev] webapp=/solr path=/update params={wt=javabin&version=2} {deleteByQuery=*:* (-1428803632004857856)} 0 126

in solr logs (e.g. /var/log/tomcat7/catalina.2013-03-07.log).

I am using POST here, just to be sure GET/stream.body does not encode things in odd ways. I added the commit attribute so the delete query gets committed automatically.

Also, did you make any changes to your RequestHandler? Does it overwrite defaults or anything like that? Check your solrconfig.xml and search for /update. Mine contains (which is what ships with solr):

<requestHandler name="/update" class="solr.UpdateRequestHandler">
</requestHandler>

There should be no <lst name="defaults">, <lst name="appends" or <lst name="invariants">

BTW, changes to the Index are not visible until a new search is opened. What happens if you delete from the index and restart solr. Are the documents still there?

EDIT: It happens to be a bug: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-3432 Adding a _version_ field to the schema fixes this (thanks to Nyxynyx for this precision)

Unable to DELETE all documents in Solr4

UPDATE

3 Answers