[SOLR-11488] Do not allow collections and aliases to have the same name

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Erick Erickson
• Created: 14/Oct/17 02:54
• Updated: 05/Dec/19 14:46

Description

Currently you can define an alias with the same name as a collection and (perhaps) vice-versa. The more I think about this the worse idea it seems. See the discussion at the linked JIRAs.

Proposal: We should fail to create a collection if an alias already exists with the same name and vice-versa.

This should depend on SOLR-11444 and supersede SOLR-11218, this JIRA will include tests that define the intended behavior making SOLR-11218 obsolete. We'll close SOLR-11218 as "contained by" this JIRA.

This will take away the ability to
1> create a collection, call it "old" and index to it.
2> decide you want to change the schema
3> create a collection call it "new" and index to it.
4> create an alias old->new THIS WILL FAIL.
5> delete the "old" collection

People will have to create an alias pointing to "old" and change their clients to use it, then they can do step 4 above....

This is kind of a pain, but much better than following an alias and deleting "new". I'd also argue that it's a maintenance problem to have collections and aliases with the same name.

What do people think? I'll try to work up a preliminary patch. If we do this, we should probably coordinate committing this and SOLR-11444 and I'll also change the docs to reflect this and upgrade notes.

Issue Links

• depends upon: SOLR-11444 Improve Aliases.java and comma delimited collection list handling
• is duplicated by: SOLR-13584 Explore prohibiting aliases and collections from having the same name.
• relates to: SOLR-11489 Create collections as _foo and auto-create an alias foo->_foo
• relates to: SOLR-11218 Fail and return an error when attempting to delete a collection that's part of an alias