Can solr be used to increment/decrement?

Question

I am working on a project right now that has a solr index of counts and ids. I am currently researching if it is possible to increment/decrement on solr directly, instead of having to retrieve the data, increment it with PHP, and then reinsert it into solr.

I have spent an hour googling variations of this to no avail. Any information would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

No, as far as I know it's not possible. You could certainly implement this in Solr as a request handler, which would retrieve the document from the underlying Lucene index, update the field, then write it back to the index and commit, but doing this too frequently will probably kill your performance. This is not really what Lucene/Solr were designed for. Consider using something like Redis instead, for this particular feature, and leave Lucene/Solr for full-text search, where it really shines.