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We're on Rails hosted by Heroku. I'm not a great dev and haven't had experience with Solr or Sphinx. We have a Postgres db and some documents, and want to add a fast, fuzzy-ish search against them (mostly just the db).

Any cons to either? Endorsements? Thanks!

OMG Ponies
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bear
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2 Answers2

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Here are a few previous discussions on Stack Overflow:

Solr is the larger and older project, and may have more/better support for advanced search features down the road, but for the case you describe, it's a tossup. It comes down to a choice between the Sunspot Solr client and the Thinking Sphinx client, both of which are excellent.

I can certainly put in an endorsement for the Websolr addon on Heroku, but it's a bit biased because I run it ;) In fact, ours was one of the first Heroku addons launched, back in the summer of 2009.

Community
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Nick Zadrozny
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  • Nick I think I'd like to talk to you about working on the project. Since I posted this we decided on WebSolr, but I'm short-staffed and can use a hand. – bear May 15 '11 at 15:25
  • Yes--I read those as well, but felt that enough time had passed to warrant a refresh, plus our context is a bit different. Thanks! – bear May 15 '11 at 15:25
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For a 'non-great developer' i'd suggest Sunspot. Then you don't need to care 1) about reindexing except the cases when you update your source code 2) about manual installing 3) you can use SQLite for testing

Alexey
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    thanks--we went with sunspot through WebSolr and it's working out great for our purposes. – bear Jul 26 '11 at 20:49
  • I can't understand what does WebSolr adds on top of Solr and what problem does it solve? – Alexey Jul 28 '11 at 14:45
  • @Alexey It adds "managed indexes" which, according to them are apache solr indexes that "just work". It sounds like it might be a good service if performance starts to becomes an issue and you're not willing to learn solr. – Noz Feb 22 '13 at 16:45