Searching Across Multiple Indexes using Solr Search Server

Question

We have setup a Solr search server containing multiple indexes. The front end contains a filter dropdown, allowing the user to select the entity to search. Search options are (Buildings, Offices, Computers).. but I need to add an "All" option.

I currently have a separate index for buildings, offices, and computers. This works great, but what is the best solution for searching across all entities??

My initial thought was to create an index for "All" that contains the fields I would like to search. This seems it would be messy since it would require many fields combined, and many duplicates since a building can contain many offices and computers.

Web front end: ASP.NET / Backbone.js

Database: SQL Server 2008

Search Server: Solr using DataImportHandler to communicate with SQL Server Have three separate indexes (Buildings, Offices, Computers).

Please let me know what the best practice is for searching across multiple entities in Solr when the entities are hierarchical. If these entities had a simple one-to-one relationship, I would create an index and combine the fields, however my entities contain a one-to-many relationship. Maybe this doesn't matter? Please advise...

Thanks!!

Answer 1

You can implement distributed search across the 3 index. You can either create a dummy aggregator core which will search across the other 3 cores or make one of the existing one core to act as aggregator.

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/DistributedSearch

Main restriction is the fact that the unique key field must be unique across all shards.