January 2013, Apache Solr™ 4.1 available
The Lucene PMC is pleased to announce the release of Apache Solr 4.1

Solr is the popular, blazing fast, open source NoSQL search platform
from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful
full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic
clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF)
handling, and geospatial search.  Solr is highly scalable, providing
fault tolerant distributed search and indexing, and powers the search
and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

Solr 4.1 is available for immediate download at:
   http://lucene.apache.org/solr/mirrors-solr-latest-redir.html

Note: starting with Solr 4.1, the "apache-" prefix has been removed
from all artifact and distribution filenames.

See the CHANGES.txt file included with the release for a full list of
details.

Solr 4.1 Release Highlights:

SolrCloud enhancements (see http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrCloud):
* Simple multi-tenancy through enhanced document routing:
  - The "compositeId" router is the default for collections with hash
    based routing (i.e. when numShards=N is specified on collection
    creation).
  - Documents with ids sharing the same domain/prefix, e.g.
    'customerB!', will be routed to the same shard, allowing for
    efficient querying.  At query time, one can specify a "shard.keys"
    parameter that lists the domains, e.g. 'shard.keys=customerB!', and
    controls what shards the query is routed to.
  - Collections that do not specify numShards at collection creation
    time use custom sharding and default to the "implicit" router.
    Document updates received by a shard will be indexed to that shard,
    unless a "_shard_" parameter or document field names a different
    shard.
* Short circuiting for distributed search if a request only needs
  to query a single shard.
* Allow creating more than one shard per instance with the Collection
  API.
* Allow access to the collections API through CloudSolrServer without
  referencing an existing collection.
* Collection API: Support for specifying a list of Solr addresses to
  spread a new collection across.
* New and improved auto host detection strategy.
* Numerous bug fixes and general hardening - it's recommended that all
  Solr 4.0 SolrCloud users upgrade to 4.1.

New features:
* The majority of Solr's features, including replication, now work with
  custom Directory and DirectoryFactory implementations.
* Indexed term offsets, specifiable via a 'storeOffsetsWithPositions'
  flag on field definitions in the schema.  Useful for highlighters.
* Solr QParsers may now be directly invoked in the lucene query syntax
  via localParams and without the _query_ magic field hack.
  Example: foo AND {!term f=myfield v=$qq}
* Solr now parses request parameters (from URL or sent with POST using
  content-type application/x-www-form-urlencoded) in its dispatcher code.
  It no longer relies on special configuration settings in Tomcat or other
  web containers to enable UTF-8 encoding, which is mandatory for correct
  Solr behaviour. Solr now works out of the box with e.g. Tomcat, JBoss,...
* Directory IO rate limiting based on the IO context.
* Distributed search support for MoreLikeThis.
* Multi-core: On-demand core loading and LRU-based core unloading after
  reaching a user-specified maximum number.
* The new Solr 4 spatial fields now work with the {!geofilt} and {!bbox}
  query parsers. The score local-param works too.
* Extra statistics to RequestHandlers - 5 & 15-minute reqs/sec rolling
  averages; median, 75th, 95th, 99th, 99.9th percentile request times.
* PostingsHighlighter support (see
  http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2012/12/a-new-lucene-highlighter-is-born.html) 

Admin UI improvements:
* Internet Explorer is now supported
* Enhanced readability of XML query response display in Query UI
* Many improvements to DataImportHandler UI
* Core creation and deletion now updates the main/left list of cores
* Admin Cores UI now redirects to newly created core details
* Deleted documents are calculated/displayed
* Allow multiple Items to stay open on Plugins-Page 

Storage improvements (thanks to the new Lucene 4.1 codec):
* Faster search, in particular for rare terms such as primary key/id
  fields.
* Stored fields are compressed. (See
  http://blog.jpountz.net/post/33247161884/efficient-compressed-stored-fields-with-lucene)

DataImportHandler contrib module backwards-compatibility breaks:
* These default to the "root" Locale, rather than the JVM default locale 
  as before.
  - NumberFormatTransformer & DateFormatTransformer
  - "formatDate" evaluator 
  - "dataimport.properties" file "last_index_time" property
* These default to UTF-8 encoding, rather than the JVM default encoding 
  as before.
  - FileDataSource & FieldReaderDataSource  
* These may require code changes to custom plug-ins
  - The EvaluatorBag class was eliminated and its public/protected methods 
    were moved to the Evaluator abstract class.
  - The experimental DIHPropertiesWriter interface was renamed DIHProperties,
    changed to an abstract class and given new signature.

Solr 4.1 also includes numerous optimizations and bugfixes.

Please report any feedback to the mailing lists 
(http://lucene.apache.org/solr/discussion.html)

Note: The Apache Software Foundation uses an extensive mirroring network
for distributing releases.  It is possible that the mirror you are using
may not have replicated the release yet.  If that is the case, please
try another mirror.  This also goes for Maven access.
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