Move search to SOLR and drop support for searching against the database

Created on 16 March 2023, over 1 year ago

Updated 11 July 2024, 4 months ago

This issue outlines a plan for 13.0.0 of Open Social.

Problem/Motivation

Open Social provides a complex community product. Search is a powerful way for users to find content within their community and ensuring that search results are accurate and provided in a performant manner is important to a successful community.

The search_api module provides a way to easily abstract over different search back-ends. However to support those different back-ends Open Social is limited to only using functionality that's within the least common denominator. This can have an adverse effect on the user experience.

In our community building experience we've seen first-hand that using the database as a search back-end can have a profoundly negative impact on platform performance. Additionally we've been unable to build some desired features which would've been supported by SOLR but were not possible with a database.

It's with this in mind that for all of our SaaS customers we've already configured a SOLR back-end and do not use the database for search anymore. Unfortunately with the work being done for improved profile configuration and privacy options → we're finding that the maintenance cost for making things work with the database back-end is becoming too high.

Proposed resolution

We plan to drop support for the search_api_db back-end 13.0.0. The social_search module's dependency will be changed from search_api_db to search_api_solr and an update hook will be provided to introduce the social_solr server, switch the indices and disable the search_api_db module.

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

API changes

Data model changes

🌱 Plan

Status

Fixed

Version

12.0

Component

Created by

🇳🇱Netherlands kingdutch

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Comments & Activities

Issue created by @kingdutch
Comment over 1 year ago →
🇳🇱Netherlands kingdutch
Unfortunately we found we could not provide an opt-out. To make sure that our platforms install properly we require adding search_api_solr as a dependency of social_search in the .info.yml. This means that SOLR will be a hard requirement for 12.0.0 and we unfortunately cant' provide a way around that without increased maintenance cost.
Status changed to Fixed 11 months ago12:46pm 2 January 2024
Comment 11 months ago →
🇳🇱Netherlands ronaldtebrake
Will be in 13.0.0
Comment 10 months ago →
System Message
Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.
Comment 9 months ago →
🇳🇱Netherlands kingdutch
Comment 4 months ago →
🇺🇸United States SocialNicheGuru
WOW. just ran into this. I thought something was misconfigured. OK. thank you for writing this up.

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