(Re)Indexing Large Repositories - Follow up questions

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In May we restarted our Tech Talk Live programme, led by architects, engineers and developers. In the first session Angel and I presented on (Re)Indexing Large Repositories.

There were many questions and we only had time to answer a few during the session. Due to the quantity of questions we have batched them up and will try to answer them in a series of blog posts. This post is the first in the series and we go through some of the easier to answer questions providing links to our documentation.

"Where/how do you tell the new solr where is the repo?"

Search Services should be configured to point at the repository using the alfresco.host and alfresco.port properties. See the solrcore.properties docs page for details.

"How compress communication works?"

You need to enable the feature in solrcore.properties by setting the “solr.request.content.compress” property. After that, just modify your Alfresco Tomcat Connector (server.xml) to accept compressed requests as detailed in the Tomcat documentation.

"What types of sharding are there?"

The various types of sharding with their pros and cons are discussed on the sharding methods docs page.

"Can we exclude some TYPEs from content indexing, while some other TYPES would still be indexed by content?"

We can control whether content is indexed by using the cm:isContentIndexed property. This can be set using a rule or behaviour that fires based on the type. See the index control docs page for more information.

"Why do we not keep a What's New page which keep track on the new feature added from one major/minor Search Service version to another?"

We produce release notes for all our products, but these are not easily accessible by the community. To mitigate this we have tried to provide blog posts covering the latest features - e.g.
Search Services 1.4.2
Search Services 1.4.1
We're also working on a new section of our docs to explain what's new in each release. This will be available for Search Services/Insight Engine 2.0 and beyond.

"Is this all Alf community? The admin console UI appears to have extra features I don't usually see"

Many parts of the presentation included enterprise features. Community Alfresco is targeted at smaller scale repositories, and so we would not expect sharding to be necessary. However many of the reindexing performance improvements in Alfresco Search Services 1.4.2 will benefit all users - enterprise and community alike. As discussed during the presentation there is currently no Community Repository (6.2.N) containing the corresponding changes. If you want to use the full features from 1.4.2 then it is possible to use the existing community release (6.2 - 201911 GA) and install the jar from this repository.

Other Blog Posts in the Series

As already mentioned this is the first blog post in a series. You can find the next part here:

• (Re)Indexing Large Repositories - Follow up questions - Part 2

If you have more questions then feel free to post them in the comments below!