The first release candidate for Solr 7.0 has been made, meaning we will probably see a release within days if no show stoppers pop up.
Update: The release was today, Sept 20th. Go and download the release now!
Solr 7 is a major version upgrade, featuring improvements such as:
- Make default response format JSON (wt=json), and also indent text responses formats (indent=on) by default – YEAH (SOLR-10494)
- Multi-word synonyms now – FINALLY – work out of the box (SOLR-10310)
- Add support for configurable metrics implementations. Graphite, Ganglia and JMX ootb (SOLR-10262)
- Add support for different replica types, that can handle updates differently. This lets you optimize slaves for max search throughput while still keeping benefits of leader failover (SOLR-10233)
- Auto Scaling feature. Lets Solr automatically allocate new shards to least busy nodes as well as move shards around, according to configurable rules.
- Modern more REST-like JSON APIs available at /api/ endpoint
- New _default config set being used if no config explicitly defined (SOLR-10574)
Some of the features that I have contributed to in this release are:
- Data driven schema now indexes text field “foo” as both “foo” (text_general) and as “foo_str” (string) to facilitate both search and faceting (SOLR-9526)
- Removed support for schema defaultOperator and defaultSearchField
- Removed old Admin UI (SOLR-10042)
- Disable remote streaming in example configs by default, making Solr more secure (SOLR-9623)
- eDismax lowercaseOperators now defaults to “false” for luceneMatchVersion >= 7.0.0 (SOLR-4646)
- Possible to set solr.data.home property as root dir for all data (SOLR-6671)
So keep your breath and watch the announce mailing list!
As always you should carefully read CHANGES.txt before upgrading. There you’ll also find cool new features introduced in former versions that you may have skipped.
To learn more and also about some of the highlights in various 6.x versions, watch this video from Lucidworks.