[SOLR-11489] Create collections as _foo and auto-create an alias foo->_foo

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Erick Erickson
• Created: 14/Oct/17 17:06
• Updated: 13/May/20 09:41

Description

Spin-off from SOLR-11488. Currently if a collection and an alias have the same name we don't test how they're resolved. So an innocent change to the code could easily change the behavior (what happens when you have a collection old, and an alias old->new and delete collection "old"? Have we even defined what should happen?).

See the discussion at SOLR-11488.

An alternative proposal to SOLR-11488 (thanks Varun for pointing it out) is when creating a collection "foo", actually name it foo and create an alias foo->_foo. Also don't allow the user to create an alias that begins with an underscore (and maybe the same for collections? An alias _foo->_foo starts to get weird).

The result would be we'd never have a collection and an alias with the same name, which would go a long way to prevent issues going forward.

This requires we consider the name in state.json to be an implementation detail, but the user won't notice. Potential here for the list of aliases to be quite large.

Of course the user could still reference the collection directly as _foo if they insisted.

Establishing this JIRA for discussion of the alternatives.

Assigning to myself to keep it from getting lost, feel free to take it over if you'd like.

Issue Links

• is related to: SOLR-11488 Do not allow collections and aliases to have the same name
• is related to: SOLR-13262 Implement collection RENAME command