Solr 1.3 set a high bar for functionality, extensibility, and performance. As time marches on, Solr committers and contributors have been hard at work engineering to make a good thing even better.

This white paper describes the new features and improvements in the latest version, Apache Solr 1.4. In the simplest terms, Solr is now faster and better than before. Central components of Solr have been improved to cut the time needed for processing queries and indexing documents. The goal: to provide a powerful, versatile search application server with ever better scalability, performance and relevancy. New features include streamlined caching, smarter handling of index changes, faster faceting, enhanced data import capabilities, speedier numeric range queries, duplicate detection and more.