Upgrade Solr

[Splines]

The search engine Solr 8 has reached end of life in October 2024, see here. We should upgrade to version 9 and then soon after to version 10 that is about to be released.

[Splines]

We should also consider the current state of solr: sunspot/sunspot#1043

[fosterfarrell9]

In view of the state of the Solr gem, we might also consider implementing the search in Postgres/ActiveRecord instead. Search is not one of our features that is heavily used and our data sets are comparatively small, so this might possibly be an option (that would rid us of another dependency).

[Splines]

agree on that 👍 Solr is also started in its own Docker container and Elasticsearch would be too. It is in the end a whole search engine and I don't really think we need this big chunk to give users the possibility to serve basic attributes. On the other hand, such search engines provide some niceties like fuzzy search... Maybe there's some smaller dependencies just for that or even in-built PostgreSQL functions, let's see.

[fosterfarrell9]

It seems there are ways in PostgreSQL to do fuzzy searches using the pg_trgrm extension, see here. In fact, there is even a Rails gem for that.