Configuring Solr 4 Data Import Handler with JDBC

Preparation

You should have set-up Solr on Tomcat along with Tika's extracting request handler as shown in the previous two guides:
   http://amac4.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/setting-up-solr-with-apache-tomcat-be.html       http://amac4.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/setting-up-tika-extracting-request.html    

Set-Up

• Firstly we need the libraries that are required to use Data Import Handler. Create a folder and name it dih (preferably in your $SOLR_HOME), and place solr-dataimporthandler-4.0.0.jar and solr-dataimporthandler-extras-4.0.0.jar from $SOLR/dist directory in the dih folder. 
  
  Add this to the solrconfig.xml file:

<lib dir="../../dih" regex=".*\.jar" />

• Now we modify the solrconfig.xml file. Add the following :

<requestHandler name="/dataimport" class="org.apache.solr.handler.dataimport.DataImportHandler">
<lst name="defaults">
<str name="config">db-data-config.xml</str>
</lst>
</requestHandler>

• Create a db-data-config.xml. This is for the Data Import Handler configuration. It should look similar to:

<dataConfig>
<dataSource driver="org.postgresql.Driver"
url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost:1234/users" user="users"
password="secret" />
<document>
<entity name="user" query="SELECT id, name from users">
<field column="id" name="id" />
<field column="name" name="name" />
<entity name="birthday" query="select birthday from table where id=${user.id}">
<field column="description" name="description" />
</entity>
</entity>
</document>
</dataConfig></dataConfig>

• For other database engines enter the specific driver, url, user and password attributes.

• We now need to modify the fields section of the schema.xml file to something like the following snippet:

<field name="id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true"
required="true"/>
<field name="name" type="text" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="birthday" type="text" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
<field name="description" type="" indexed="true"
stored="true"/>

Solr may not like type="text", if so then change it to text_general

One more thing before the indexing – you should copy an appropriate JDBC driver to the $SOLR_HOME/lib directory of your Solr installation or the dih directory we created before. You can get the libraries from the databases websites

To index, run the following query: http://localhost:8080/solr/dataimport?command=full-import .The HTTP protocol is asynchronous so you won't be updated on the status of the indexing process. To check the status of the indexing process, you can run the command once again.