SearchStax Cloud Help Center

The SearchStax Help Center Frequently Asked Questions page includes FAQs about SearchStax Cloud, our hosted Apache Solr Cloud service.

Can I make a “major” Solr upgrade?

A “major” Solr upgrade means to go from Solr 6.x to Solr 7.x, or from Solr 7.x to Solr 8.x. These are non-trivial upgrades because they involve changes to the Solr Schema and consequent reindexing of your documents.

Self-service (silver) clients can follow the procedure on this page. Premium clients (gold, platinum, platinum plus) should contact SearchStax Support so we can help you and possibly adjust your annual billing.

Please examine Apache’s Solr Upgrade Notes before proceeding.

Minor-version upgrades are easily performed in the same manner as scaling up a deployment to have more memory and disk space. You must use the same cloud provider, but the content can migrate using a backup/restore path.

For a major-version Solr upgrade, the backup/restore path is not available. This means that index files are not compatible across major Solr versions. Changes in the Solr schema make it necessary to reindex all of your data.

Best Practice: A/B Upgrade Path for Major-Version Solr Upgrade

To upgrade from one major Solr release to a different one, the best practice is to:

  1. Your current deployment is deployment A.
  2. Create a new deployment using the desired version of Solr (deployment B).
  3. Configure B. Note that there will probably be significant changes to the Solr schema if this is a major-Solr-version upgrade.
  4. Load your data into deployment B.
  5. Validate the behavior of deployment B.
  6. Switch over from A to B.
  7. Delete deployment A.
You will be billed for the number of days that each deployment was active during the month. Running two deployments side-by-side during the transition period results in a small increase in your monthly bill.

Questions?

Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.

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