Lucene as data store

Question

Is it possible to use Lucene as full fledged data store (like other(mongo,couch) nosql variants).

I know there are some limitations like newly updated documents by one indexer will not be shown in other indexer. So we need to restart the indexer to get the updates.

But i stumble upon solr lately, it seems these problems are avoided by some kind of snapshot replication.

So i thought i could use lucene as a data store since this also uses same kind of documents(JSON based) used by mongo and couch internally to manage documents, and its proven indexing algorithm fetches the records super fast.

But i am curious has anybody tried that before..? if not what are reasons not choosing this approach.

Answer 1

There is also the problem of durability. While a Lucene index should not get corrupted ever, I've seen it happen. And the approach Lucene takes to repairing a broken index is "throw it away and rebuild from the original data". Which makes perfect sense for an indexing tool. But it does require you to have the data stored somewhere else.