Thank you for your feedback, Andrew. I appreciate your candour and passion.
On Fri, 5 Sept 2025 at 12:40, Andrew Hankinson <[email protected]> wrote: > I would guess that most, if not all, members of this list have done an > evaluation where they put Solr up against ES/OS, and chose Solr for one > reason or another. > This is not a zero-sum game. For fresh adoption, unfortunately it is. As you said, those who have already chosen Solr know why they chose: my intention is not to do anything different for them. > If you feel so strongly that Solr is currently a "cesspool of mediocrity," > then maybe you need to find something that better fits your own needs and > standards of quality. There are some (many?) of us who value the stability, > and consistent incremental improvements without requiring massive amounts > of rewrites at every release because somebody thinks they need to follow > the latest fad. > I've upgraded Solr to Lucene 10 (SOLR-17631), it should take care of those who value stability and incremental improvements, esp. performance. > > Your list seems to be written from the perspective of someone who does not > actually need to take responsibility for the features that you seem to > think we need. When I see lists like this I, and probably most professional > programmers, see a mountain of bugs and support questions all coming at > once, on top of the work to plan, write, and test the code. Incremental > improvements are a way to make these manageable. That, and most of your > stuff means Solr needs to replicate functionality that is already > available. If I need a Kibana / Dashboards setup, I will use that -- I'm > not going to be religious about not using it just because the underlying > search engine. These are tools, not religions. > Unfortunately, there's nothing close to as good as Kibana or OpenSearch Dashboards for Solr to my knowledge. There used to be a fork of Kibana for Solr (called Banana, by Andrew T of Lucidworks), but that project has likely gone stale. > There are also opportunities in your list of requests for you to > contribute back. The easiest way to get some of your requests into Solr is > to take it responsibility for it, plan, write, test, and go through the > review process, and commit to helping maintain it. Perhaps if you were to > choose one of your items and do that, you would get a feeling for how much > work you're actually talking about here, rather than (what seems like) > firing off a set of your demands for people to contribute their own time > and money so that you can live in your "happy bubble". > > -Andrew > > > On 5 Sep 2025, at 02:47, Ishan Chattopadhyaya <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > >> Your list has cool stuff but I think mostly can ship at whatever minor > > version. Solr has seen incremental progress over the years at minor > > releases. > > > > If we don't ship headline grabbing features in a major release, we might > as > > well abandon this project and dedicate our focus on building OpenSearch > or > > Elasticsearch. > > We have had so many important features in Apache Solr introduced in some > > incremental release in 9.x. But, what is the perception among users about > > Solr's capabilities? I will not say here what I believe people think of > > Apache Solr in 2025, lest you or others shoot down the messenger of bad > > news, just to stay in a happy bubble. > > > >> FWIW I think Solr 11 is very likely to occur within a year following > Solr > >> 10. Maybe that's the release of your dreams, but progress will be > >> incremental (delivering value sooner). > > > > It would be very unfortunate to let Apache Solr languish in a cesspool of > > mediocrity for an entire release cycle. > > > > > > On Fri, 5 Sept 2025 at 02:38, David Smiley <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> I suppose we all have our wish list of what we want the next major > version > >> to have. I have mine (mostly geeky internal details BTW).... and as the > >> need to release draws near, I get more realistic as to what limited time > >> resources I'm going to spend on what topic. What can wait vs what > "needs" > >> to happen at a major version boundary. For many existing Solr users, > their > >> *pressing* needs will be met with up to date versions Java & Jetty & > Lucene > >> -- all things present in Solr 10 right now. Your list has cool stuff > but I > >> think mostly can ship at whatever minor version. Some highly wanted > things > >> will come to 9.x. Solr has seen incremental progress over the years at > >> minor releases. The major releases are not that significant except for > an > >> opportunity to break compatibility in some way. That is really > important > >> for us stewarding a project that's been around for almost 20 years -- we > >> have to get rid of things or change things. > >> > >> FWIW I think Solr 11 is very likely to occur within a year following > Solr > >> 10. Maybe that's the release of your dreams, but progress will be > >> incremental (delivering value sooner). > >> > >> On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 2:42 PM Ishan Chattopadhyaya < > >> [email protected]> wrote: > >> > >>> Hi All, > >>> > >>> Here's my wishlist for Solr 10, to make Solr claw back the lost/losing > >>> mindshare amongst developers and AI practitioners. > >>> > >>> Here's what I think Solr 10 release should have (in addition to > whatever > >> we > >>> already have): > >>> > >>> ** Vector Search / AI* > >>> - GPU based HNSW indexing > >>> - Local embeddings generation > >>> - Multi-vector fields > >>> - Visualization, metrics, recipes > >>> - Easy integration with storage and inference platforms like Sagemaker, > >>> Nemo, AWS S3 Vectors and everything else > >>> - Stretch goal: Global vectors indexing support (like IVF family of > >>> algorithms) > >>> - First party MCP support > >>> > >>> ** General* > >>> - Official client libraries in Python, Rust, Go, etc. > >>> - Something akin to Kibana / OpenSearch dashboards > >>> - A new modern UI with feature completeness > >>> - Entries in every meaningful AI leaderboard out there, preferably at > par > >>> with other Lucene based search engines > >>> - Tons of more examples and live demos > >>> > >>> > >>> ** User experience *- Fix naming everywhere (if you know Solr, you know > >>> what I mean) > >>> - No confusion around various modes of Solr > >>> - Clear documentation of the API > >>> > >>> We may be able to achieve these, or we might not be able to. If we work > >>> towards these goals (or some of these), these should be achievable. We > >> will > >>> be in an excellent position with regard to earning back respect among > the > >>> community and placing it at par or above search and AI engines. Solr 10 > >> is > >>> a great time to hit these goals. > >>> > >>> If someone has ideas (no matter how crazy, hard, or exploratory) on > what > >>> else could be good to have, please help us with suggestions. > >>> > >>> Thanks and regards, > >>> Ishan > >>> > >>> > >>> [image: SearchScale] > >>> *Ishan Chattopadhyaya* > >>> *Search Consultant, SearchScale* > >>> > >>> [email protected] > >>> > >> > >
