Why are document stores like Lucene / Solr not included in NoSQL conversations?

Question

All of us have come across the recent hype of no-SQL solutions lately. MongoDB, CouchDB, BigTable, Cassandra, and others have been listed as no-SQL options. Here's an example:

http://architects.dzone.com/articles/what-nosql-store-should-i-use

However, three years ago a co-worker and I were using Lucene.NET as what seem to fit the description of no-SQL. We did not use it just for user-inputted search queries; we used it to make a few reindexed RDBMS table data extremely performant. We implemented our own .NET sort-of-equivalent-to-Solr service to manage these indexes and make them callable. When I left the company, the team switched to Solr itself. (For those not in the know, Solr is a web service that wraps Lucene with REST-callable queries and index dumps.)

What I don't understand is, why is Solr not counted in the typical lists of no-SQL solution options? Am I missing something here? I assume that there are technical reasons why Solr is not comparable to the likes of CouchDB, etc., and in fact I understand that CouchDB uses Lucene as its data store (yes?), but what disqualifies Solr?

I'm not asking as some kind of Solr fanboy or anything, I just don't understand why Solr and the like don't fit the definition of no-SQL, and if Solr technically does fit the definition then what about it likely makes people pooh-pooh it? I'm asking because I'm having difficulty determining whether I should continue using Lucene-based solutions (like Solr) for solutions that I build or if I should really do more research with these other options.

Answer 1

I once listened to an interview with author Ursula K. LeGuin about fiction writing. The interviewer asked her about authors who work in different genre of writing. What makes one author a romance writer, and another a mystery writer, and another a science fiction writer? LeGuin responded by explaining:

Genre is about marketing, not about content.

It was an eye-opening statement.

I think the same applies to technology solutions. The NoSQL movement is attracting attention because it's full of marketing energy right now. NoSQL data stores like Hadoop, CouchDB, MongoDB, have commercial ventures backing them, pushing their solutions as new and innovative and exciting so they can grow their business. The term "NoSQL" is a marketing brand that helps them to explain their value.

You're right that Lucene/Solr is technically very similar to a NoSQL document store: it's a denormalized bag of documents (their term) with fields that aren't necessarily consistent across the collection of documents. It's indexed in a sophisticated way to allow you to search across all fields or by specific fields.

But that's not the genre Lucene uses to explain its value. They don't have the same mission to grow a market and a business, since they're managed by the Apache Foundation. They're happy to focus on the use case of fulltext search, even though the technology could be used in other ways. They're following a tenet of software success: do one thing, and do it well.

Answer 2

After doing more Google-searching, I think this document sums it up pretty well:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100504055638/http://www.lucidimagination.com/blog/2010/04/30/nosql-lucene-and-solr/

Case in point, Lucene/Solr is NoSql and could be considered one of NoSql's more mature "forefathers". It just does not get the NoSql hype it deserves because it didn't invent the term "no-SQL" and its users don't use the term, so the hype machine overlooked it.

Answer 3

I think that the most relevant characteristic of solr/lucene that drops from the nosql list it's because until recently, making lucene work as a real-time system was a pain. The usual workflow for any performant application was to index the incremental updates in batchs, and updating the index every 5 minutes for example.

Answer 4

I think that stimpy77 is partly right on the NoSQL being a branding thing. But also, NoSQL means that it's a data storage platform that is simpler/easier then SQL based solutions. And I think while Solr/Lucene share some aspects (they store data), it really misses the mark to think that Solr/Lucene could be used as primary data storage for anything that has relationships. Sure, lots of documents can be thrown into it, and powerful search pull them back. But as soon as you want relationships, then others such as CouchDB and others do much better that have a query syntax of some kind. Search is a bandaid solution in that case. Think about the use case "find all documents tagged with word 'car'". If I have some structures in my data, then it's easy for me to get the document for tag car, and pull everybody back. Versus relying on a search query that includes fq=tag:'car'. Search is more and more powerful the fewer relationships you have, but the more relationships, the better a datastore like CouchDB and brethren are. Thats why you still see CouchDB and friends paired with Solr, and vice versa! Let each one do what it does best.

Of course, that isn't to say you can't leverage storing your source data in Solr, that can be a powerful tool to use!

Answer 5

The main differences between a no sql and solr in operational wise are the following in my opinion.

1. Solr requires an intermediate data store (database or XML files) whereas nosql itself a straight data store.
2. You cannot do a constant writes to solr (solr 4.0 seems to bring that support) and you can only index at the max of every 2 mins and 200 records (which is very slow for high throughput writes and you are forced for an intermediate storage).
3. You are require to change / define the schema when you alter what is stored in document. NoSQL has no such definitions.
4. Solr indexes has performance implication when its index size grows whereas NoSQL is optimized for it (or claims to be :) )
5. Solr has underlying lucene search algorithms bundled but in NoSQL you need to build them, This applies to the magnificent faceted search or blazing fast document search provided by solr.

Answer 6

Last but few points, Its about the difference not the one mentioned here as marketing strategy in which solr goes out from NoSQL

Lucene/Solr - Iam gonna use Solr, Since Solr uses lucene internally and has addition features. So Solr is basically an upgrade to Lucene with new constume.

• Solr is mainly used for purpose to create facets and indexing plain texts for search engine.

• Solr can use most of the databases to store its data. It is inconsistent to keep data in solr since it directly use disks.

• NoSQL databases are easy to learn compared to Solr. Solr is more or less having lot of configurations and concepts (For eg: Fields).

• Performance is something that we have to consider b/w . Solr provides high performance compared to other NoSQL databases.

Note: Combining the Solr with some databases provides the best performance.

Summary: Solr is also a NoSQL datastore which is a predecessor of all NoSQL databases. Which didn't get the hype of others. But still in the field due to its performance and power.