IndexTank FAQ
Now that IndexTank has been acquired by LinkedIn, I'm looking for an alternative that has similar functionality.
We have received a lot of messages like these from IndexTank customers with great questions, and have decided to start a FAQ to answer them all.
Do you have plans to create a free starter plan?
Because Apache Solr is open source, you don't need an account with us to get started with development. We encourage you to work your way through the Solr tutorial and set up a local instance of Solr for development. Some Solr clients (such as Sunspot) even come bundled with a copy of Solr for this purpose, and you can install Solr quickly with package managers like apt-get and homebrew.
Once you are ready to ship to staging or production, we can provide you with a free trial to evaluate our services. Just get in touch with us at info@onemorecloud.com and we can provide you with a coupon code as well as answer any questions you may have.
We recognize that there are other benefits for a free starter plan, but we don't have any intention to offer one in the near future.
Can Solr do real-time updates?
Yes!
Traditionally, real-time updates have been one of Solr's weak spots. However, it has become available in recent versions of Lucene. We have soft-launched our own support real-time functionality for Solr 3, and are very pleased with the results so far.
Eventually we plan to transition all of our customers to real-time search, but in the mean time, give it a try and let us know how it goes!
Can Solr do custom scoring functions?
Yes, and because they can be supplied per query, you may use as many as you like. From the Solr Function Queries documentation:
FunctionQuery allows one to use the actual value of a field and functions of those fields in a relevancy score.
The sky is the limit!
Can Solr do [X]?
Generally speaking, Solr and IndexTank share a common conceptual lineage, due to their both using Lucene. In most ways, IndexTank's feature set can be considered a subset of Solr's feature set.
In short, if it could be done on IndexTank, then it can be done on Websolr.
If you have more specific questions, please let us know and we'll help clarify.