One of the many features that have come out for SolrCloud has been collection aliasing. As the name suggests, it aliases the collection, in other words gives another name or a pointer to a collection (which can be changed) behind the scenes.
Among other things the most important uses of aliasing a collection could the power to change an index without having to change or modify the client applications. It helps in disconnecting the view from the actual index. So let's see how can we practically use this feature for rather common stuff.
Collection aliasing command:
http://<hostname>:<port>/solr/admin/collections?
collections=list-of-collections
Firstly, it gives users the ability to reindex their content into another collection and then swap it out. If you begin with a setup as in Fig. 1, you'd have to follow the following steps:
Updating an existing alias:
An existing alias can be updated with just a fresh CREATEALIAS call with the new alias specifications.
Secondly, the collection aliasing command lets users to specify a single name for a set of collections. This comes in handy if the data has time windows e.g. month-wise. Every month can be a collection by itself and things like last-month, last-quarter can be aliases of appropriate months. It can also be useful when the data gets added e.g. in case of travel/geo search. A continent could be an alias, consisting of collections holding data for certain countries. As data for other countries from the continent comes in, you may create a new collection for those countries and add those to the existing continent aliases.
There's no limit as to what aliasing can be practically used for as far as use cases are concerned, but hope the ones mentioned above help you get an idea of what aliasing is broadly about.
Related Readings:
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-4497
Apache Solr Guide
Among other things the most important uses of aliasing a collection could the power to change an index without having to change or modify the client applications. It helps in disconnecting the view from the actual index. So let's see how can we practically use this feature for rather common stuff.
Collection aliasing command:
http://<hostname>:<port>/solr/admin/collections?
action=CREATEALIAS&
name=alias-name&collections=list-of-collections
Fig 1. myindex with a read and a write alias each
Firstly, it gives users the ability to reindex their content into another collection and then swap it out. If you begin with a setup as in Fig. 1, you'd have to follow the following steps:
- Switch the write alias to a new index.
- Start re-indexing using the index update client that you use. That way you never change the name/alias but behind the scenes, all the updates go to a new index.
- Once the re-indexing is complete, change the read alias to use the new index too.
Updating an existing alias:
An existing alias can be updated with just a fresh CREATEALIAS call with the new alias specifications.
Secondly, the collection aliasing command lets users to specify a single name for a set of collections. This comes in handy if the data has time windows e.g. month-wise. Every month can be a collection by itself and things like last-month, last-quarter can be aliases of appropriate months. It can also be useful when the data gets added e.g. in case of travel/geo search. A continent could be an alias, consisting of collections holding data for certain countries. As data for other countries from the continent comes in, you may create a new collection for those countries and add those to the existing continent aliases.
There's no limit as to what aliasing can be practically used for as far as use cases are concerned, but hope the ones mentioned above help you get an idea of what aliasing is broadly about.
Related Readings:
JIRA: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-4497
Apache Solr Guide
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