That Solr presentation I did…

Symposium 2019 seems a loooong time ago now – but it was only last November. Back then, I did a session on understanding the basics of Solr and SolrCloud to help Sitecore developers with their production deployments.

Symposium Slides: O’ Solr Mio!

This year, my talk at Sitecore Symposium was an introduction to deploying Solr for production use. It covered why you want SolrCloud, what you need to plan for it, and how you can go about installing it. Enough for a beginner to get from a blank Windows Server to running SolrCloud, and Sitecore configured to match.

If you missed my talk, or if you saw it and want to study it further, then you are in luck!

A new option for developer Solr installs

One of the interesting changes that’s part of the coming release of Sitecore v9.3 is the integration of the Solr installation into the SIF scripts for developers. Given I’ve had a go at doing this myself in the past, I thought it would be interesting to look at their approach and see how it works…

Dealing with very long running search builds

A problem I’ve encountered a number of times in my Sitecore career is that when content trees are large and indexing tasks complex, it can take such a long time to perform a full rebuild of a search index that your web application can end up recycling for some reason before the build completes… Once content grows to this size, search can become quite difficult to manage, so I’ve been experimenting with a tool to help.

Pay attention to your index exclusions

I hit an interesting issue recently: Some code that worked fine on a QA instance of Sitecore had been deployed for UAT and was now failing with an odd error message. Whilst this issue was entirely our fault, there wasn’t much in Google about the error messages I was seeing, so I’m trying to correct that problem today…

A Second attempt at installing Solr with SIF

Recently Steve McGill asked me if I’d tried using SIF’s certificate creation when automating Solr setup for Sitecore. I realised I’d not put any effort into how this might work – and that seemed like an excellent excuse for some research…

You can have “Solr as a Service” now…

Recently I was writing about the changes to Java licensing that Oracle are enforcing in 2019. It’s not an uncommon reaction to the challenges that the new license introduces to start thinking about alternatives to how you might manage search for your Sitecore deployments. So what can you do?

Surviving the developers’ Javapocalypse

It’s Christmas, and I’m dreaming of a festive sherry, while I slog through my last working day of the year. So hopefully you can forgive me the flagrant clickbait headline… 😉

But you’d have to have your head in the sand not to have noticed that Oracle are changing the licensing terms for their builds of the Java runtime. They’ve decided that they want people and businesses to pay for the fastest access to support updates for Java. But as Sitecore developers, many of us make use of Solr – which relies on Java. So what can we do?

I’m sure my renderings were there yesterday?

As time goes on, something I’ve noticed is that as Sitecore evolves it is taking a greater reliance on search integration – making things like Solr ever more important. And that leads to an exciting new set of issues you come across if, for some reason, your search service is not available.

I wasted some perfectly good development time recently when some of my renderings vanished from published pages, thanks to this.

If you have to use Ninject with Solr…

My first time having to configure Solr for Sitecore recently taught me a variety of new things. (I know – how have I managed to avoid it this long?) Most of the basics of the setup have been well documented elsewhere, so I won’t repeat any of that. However setting up the site to use the Ninject DI container wasn’t as smooth as the documentation suggested, so here are some notes on the issues I hit in case you find yourself stuck: