12.12. Apache SOLR Translator

The Apache SOLR Translator, known by the type name solr, exposes querying functionality to Solr Data Sources. Apache Solr is a search engine built on top of Apache Lucene for indexing and searching. This translator provides an easy way to connect to existing or new Solr search systems, and provides way to add documents/records directly from user or other sources that are integrated with JDV. It also gives ability to read/update/delete existing documents from Solr Search system.

The Solr Translator currently has no import or execution properties. It does not define any extension metadata.

Here are some usecases for this translator:

Solr search system provides searches based on indexed search fields. Each Solr instance is typically configured with a single core that defines multiple fields with different type information. Teiid metadata querying mechanism is equipped with "Luke" based queries, that at deploy time of the VDB use this mechanism to retrieve all the stored/indexed fields. Currently Teiid does NOT support dynamic fields and non-stored fields. Based on retrieved fields, Solr translator exposes a single table that contains all the fields. If a field is multi-value based, its type is represented as Array type.

Once this table is exposed through VDB in a Teiid database, and Solr Data Sources is created, the user can issue "INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE" based SQL calls to insert/update/delete documents into the Solr, and issue "SELECT" based calls to retrieve documents from Solr. You can use full range of SQL with Teiid system integrating other sources along with Solr source.

The Solr Translator supports SELECT statements with a restrictive set of capabilities including: comparison predicates, IN predicates, LIMIT and Order By.

Here is an example dynamic VDB:

<vdb name="search" version="1">
    <model name="solr">
        <source name="node-one" translator-name="solr" connection-jndi-name="java:/solrDS"/>
    </model>
<vdb>

<vdb name="search" version="1">
    <model name="solr">
        <source name="node-one" translator-name="solr" connection-jndi-name="java:/solrDS"/>
    </model>
<vdb>

The translator does NOT provide a connection to the Solr. For that purpose, Teiid has a JCA adapter that provides a connection to Solr using the SolrJ Java library. See an example in see an example in jboss-as/docs/teiid/datasources/solr

If you are using Designer Tooling, to create VDB then create/use a Teiid Designer Model project, use the "Teiid Connection - Source Model" importer, create a Solr Data Source using the Data Source Creation Wizard and use solr as translator in the importer. The search table is created in a source model by the time you finish with this importer. Create a VDB and deploy into Teiid Server and use either jdbc, odbc or odata to query.

Use the JDV-specific Solr Resource Adapter with this translator.