I’ve been a big fan of Solr for quite a long time, and have used it extensively at work.

I noticed a few weeks ago that Jake Luciani had managed to get Lucene (which Solr uses) working on Cassandra (Facebook’s highly scalable keystore).

The next step had an obvious name: Solandra – Solr running on Cassandra.

Basically there wasn’t too much to getting it going in the limited form it is now – a few minor changes to Jake’s Lucandra code, a custom Solr FieldType (exactly why I needed this I’m unsure) and correctly configured solrconfig.xml and schema.xml files.

I haven’t tested updates, so you’ll probably need Jake’s BookmarkDemo to load data in.

My changes to the Lucandra index reader include hard coding (!) the fields returned by getFieldNames(..) to match the Solr schema and the fields added in the demo.

If anyone is interested, the code is available: solandra.zip. You’ll need to be a Java developer to use it, though.