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I'm trying to understand the pros and cons of installing Windchill Index Search (Solr). I don't see any way to create a poll here so I'll just start with this question:
Is Windchill Index Search (Solr) installed and operational in your Windchill environment?
If you said 'yes', then I have a bunch more questions:
Usability
Configuration
Maintenance
Thanks!
Usability
Configuration
Maintenance
We have it installed and it is most useful for tracking down drawings with particular notes. For instance if there is a GIDEP and you want to find out what parts use an alloy from the GIDEP, you can use the keyword search to find all of the drawings with that alloy.
Or if an engineer wants to copy some notes from a unique drawing and knows part the words that that were used, the user can search based on words in the drawing notes to find it.
So is the index search on as the default search method for all users or do they only turn it on when they have a specific need for it?
Hi @TomU,
If indexsearch is installed all users uses it generally.
If user doesn't want to use ISearch he can turn of it by preference.
Best Regards
PetrH
Its only used when a user runs a keyword search. Most users use the keyword search because being in the upper right corner of the interface it is the most visible. I personally do not use keyword search unless there is something in the field of the drawing I am looking for. I have a saved advanced search with created by, mod by, number, title, ect turned on and I use those fields instead.
Usability
Configuration
Maintenance
Thanks!
Usability
Maintenance
Here are the Windchill 'keyword' search locations that I've found:
It looks like adding Solr also allows faceted searching to be performed. Do you by chance have that preference turned on as well?
Yep. That is the 'Refine Results' I mentioned above if the initial search results returned too many objects.
Is Windchill Index Search (Solr) installed and operational in your Windchill environment?
Yes. We have been using solr for several years now.
If you said 'yes', then I have a bunch more questions:
Usability
Configuration
Maintenance
Thanks for the reply. Seems like I'm running out of reasons not to install it. 😉
Sort of off topic, since you're running the Solr process on the Windchill server, are you by chance also running the Windchill database on the same server, or is that still separate? I've always ran them on separate servers, but I'm wondering if maybe I would see a performance increase if the Windchill application didn't have to cross the network stack to talk to the database. Thoughts?
@TomU wrote:
Thanks for the reply. Seems like I'm running out of reasons not to install it. 😉
Sort of off topic, since you're running the Solr process on the Windchill server, are you by chance also running the Windchill database on the same server, or is that still separate? I've always ran them on separate servers, but I'm wondering if maybe I would see a performance increase if the Windchill application didn't have to cross the network stack to talk to the database. Thoughts?
I am running the Windchill db on the same server. Have done that forever and has always worked good for us. Originally on Solaris using zones and now on RedHat. As long as your server has enough cpu/ram/disk there is no technical reason to not run it on the same server.
We use SQL Server and I'll have to check how the licensing works. I think Microsoft may force us to license all vCPU cores for SQL Server which I definitely wouldn't want to do if running a monolithic setup. I'm not really limited by available RAM, CPU, or disk. I can pretty much throw whatever I want at these VMs. 🙂
@TomU wrote:
We use SQL Server and I'll have to check how the licensing works. I think Microsoft may force us to license all vCPU cores for SQL Server which I definitely wouldn't want to do if running a monolithic setup. I'm not really limited by available RAM, CPU, or disk. I can pretty much throw whatever I want at these VMs. 🙂
Maybe you could get clever with a docker container running in the same host:
You can limit the number of cpus a container uses:
https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/resource_constraints/
--cpus and --cpuset-cpus