What's your experience with Solr?

Your question is a pretty tough question to answer without just repeating the feature list from http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ because of the breadth of it.

However, if I picked a specific strength and a weakness then the strength would be "Get it done". Solr gives you amazing search very quickly, very painlessly. There aren't lots of management tools that you have to run, or separate processes to configure, or cumbersome licensing restrictions. It is just pure search made easy.

If I had to pick a specific weakness, it would be the lack of support for a traditional operations team... You need to know your way around Solr, there isn't any powerful management console to hide away Solr. You primarily are working with configuration files to set things up. And looking at log files etc to see what is happening under the covers.

Having said that, once you have a Solr running, you don't typically need to do much to it, it just runs and runs. And the documentation is quite good for an open source project, and there is a great book about Solr (Disclaimer: I am a co-author ;-) ) available at http://www.packtpub....-search-server. There is also a very detailed reference guide that is good for folks who know their way around the Solr ecosystem at http://www.lucidimag...eference-Guide.

It depends on you. If you are not an expert in information retrieval and just want a good full text search for your app without a lot of fuss then solr works great.

If, on the other hand, you are well versed IR and want to customize ranking functions and things of this nature then you are probably better off rolling your own or using lucene directly.