Multi-lingual Solr setup

Question

I have a number of documents quite evenly distributed among a number of languages (6 at the moment, perhaps 12 in the near future). There would be no need to guess the language of a document, as that information is available.

Furthermore, the use-cases for search are such that one search will always be in one language and search only for documents in that language.

Now, I want to apply proper language handling such as stemming to both index and queries. What would be the suggested way to go? From my yet limited Solr knowledge, I can imagine:

• Just use one core per language. Keeps the indexes small, the queries match the language by core URL and the configuration is simple. However, it duplicates lots of the configuration.
• Use one core and apply something like Solr: DIH for multilingual index & multiValued field?. The search for a specific language would than be via a field such as title_de:sehen

Answer 1

I sure one core per language is the best solution.

You can share all configuration except schema.xml between cores (using single conf folder) and specify schema.xml location per core (check http://wiki.apache.org/solr/CoreAdmin)

Answer 2

I went with a single core instead. The duplication of configuration was daunting. Now it’s all in a single core. A bit of Java magic, and it works perfectly.