Attending:

Demian has ported the support for Solr sharding to VuFind 2. The new implementation differs from the 1.x version in some important ways:

• The shard-related configuration has been moved from config.ini to searches.ini; these are not really global configuration settings, and it makes more sense to localize them to a specific module. That way, each module can have its own shard configuration as needed.
• The [StripFacets] section of facets.ini has been eliminated because it is redundant – facet stripping can be addressed by the same values in the [StripFields] section of searches.ini.
• The old implementation persisted user-selected shards in the session, which meant that URL-sharing could have unpredictable results; the new implementation persists shards through GET parameters for bookmarkable URLs.
• Sharding has been built into the Search Object data model. This means that non-Solr modules can use the sharding mechanism if they have an equivalent feature (i.e. multiple databases in EBSCO, multiple sources in a federated search, etc., etc.).

The next call will be Tuesday, May 29, 2012 at 10am Eastern Daylight Time (14:00 GMT).