[storm]

I've been using Solr for some pretty heavy lifting, and it's incredibly impressive. Rock solid, extremely advanced analysis and search capabilities, and the performance is amazing if it's on suitable gear. Time invested in learning it pays off big.

I'm familiar with the enterprise black boxes you're talking about - I probably know the specific one you're tormented by. I've seen the licensing fees alone lead large companies to drop rows from their front-end stores to avoid going into a new pricing tier (takes balls of steel to charge by the record, I must say), and I've seen competitors fold at least in part due to the expense of paying for the thing.

A lot of startup folks getting excited about NoSQL seem to have passed over Lucene/Solr completely, and I think it's worthy of much more consideration than it gets. It's mature, it's fast, and the people working on it live and breathe the problem space.

There are undoubtedly devs out there badly needing powerful analysis and search to execute on their vision, but who will end up suffering with half-baked solutions for lack of even hearing about Solr, much less giving it a try.

[ankimal]

I feel another issue is that management sometimes feels that paying big bucks means your rear end is covered. It takes a lot to convince them that this is free and works great at the same time. Whats more, the community is great!