Search Engine - Lucene or Solr

Question

We need to integrate a search engine in our Product Catalog management software. the catalog is expected to have more than 4-5 mn. records with relational data spread over s

Answer 1

I have to agree with Andrew Clegg. I think when a lot of Java Developer types look at Lucene vs Solr, Lucene looks more friendly because it's a just a library (POJJ: Plain Old Java Jar!), like any other library and it looks straightforward to embed, versus the complexity of standing Solr up as a separate process that communicates over complex HTTP.

However, I think that for almost all search use cases, Solr is the right approach. Because most of the complexity in Search is not the direct initial integration, but in the fuzzy areas of tuning searches, scaling to meet demand, and maintaining your indexes that cross over from the developer centric world to being in the systems world. And Solr handles all of those needs nicely.