Grant’s Grunts: Lucene Edition

Hardly news anymore about MS dropping support for *NIX platforms, but I especially like J Lawson’s nice little quote about their switch from FAST to Apache Solr/Lucene:

We very quickly switched to Apache Lucene, Solr and are very happy with the result. Performance is good, and we have cut hosting costs by a staggering 400%.

via J Lawson’s Blog Space » 2010 » February.

I’ve seen likewise reductions (and sometimes more significant ones)  in other replacements I’ve been involved with at Lucid Imagination.  To me, the likely reason is the flexibility that Lucene/Solr provide for an application to model it’s domain as efficiently as needed.  Not too much, not too little instead of the “kitchen sink” approach which turns on every feature by default.  Too often, I think buyers are seduced by a really long feature list, even though their application may only need 80% of those features.  After all, would you pay extra for a car with heated seats if you lived in the tropics?  With Solr, you get rock solid search capabilities (no one disputes that, because all the vendors pretty much use the same model) and can easily turn on/off most of the other features.  Furthermore, if you need something not included (most of the time you don’t, b/c it’s already there), you can choose the best in breed implementation of that feature and integrate it.

At any rate, as Shalin said the other day, Apache L/S welcomes all FAST *NIX users.