In my Solr queries, I want to sort most recently accessed documents to the top ("accessed" meaning opened by user action). No other search criteria has weight for me: of the documents with text matching the query, I want them in order of recent use. I can only think of two ways to do this:
1) Include a 'last accessed' date field in each doc to have Solr sort upon. Trie Date fields can be sorted very quickly, I'm told. The problem of course is keeping the field up to date, which would require storing each document's text so I can delete and re-add any document with an updated 'last accessed' field. Mutable fields would obviate this, but Lucene/Solr still doesn't offer mutable fields.
2) Alternatively, store the mutable 'last accessed' dates and keep them updated in another db. This would require Solr to return the full list of matching documents, which could be upwards of hundreds of thousands of documents. This huge list of document ids would then be matched up against dates in the db and then sorted. It would work OK for uncommon search terms, but not for broad, common search terms.
So the trade off is between 1) index size plus a processing cost every time a document is accessed and 2) big query overhead, especially for unfocused search terms
Do I have any alternatives?
