Testing Lucene’s index durability after crash or power loss by Mike McCandless.
From the post:
One of Lucene’s useful transactional features is index durability which ensures that, once you successfully call IndexWriter.commit, even if the OS or JVM crashes or power is lost, or you kill -KILL your JVM process, after rebooting, the index will be intact (not corrupt) and will reflect the last successful commit before the crash.
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If anyone at your startup is writing an indexing engine, be sure to pass this post from Mike along.
Ask them for a demonstration of equal durability of the index before using their work instead of Lucene.
You have enough work to do without replicating (poorly) work that already has enterprise level reliability.