Compass now supports parallel indexing for both the Hibernate and JPA devices. Parallel indexing is now the default mode for both devices.

The parallel indexing process partitions the index entities according to their sub index assignment, creates N threads (based on the sub indexes partitions) and index them in parallel (fetches the content from the database and index them in Compass). This features works thanks to the fact that each sub index is a fully functional Lucene index and locking is performed on the sub index level. More information about it can be found here.

The parallel indexing feature is part of Compass RC1 SNAPSHOT. I wonder how much performance gains this feature provides, so if you get the chance to try it out, it would be interesting to hear back comparisons (I did some internal testing, but I wonder how real life scenarios work). You can leave a comment with your results if you have the time to try it out. Naturally, there are other ways to improve the indexing process which I blogged about before.

The Spring Experience looked like an excellent show. Sadly, I ate something that didn’t agree with me, and spent most of the time at the hotel room. I was hoping to talk and meet so many people, but did not manage to do almost anything. At one point I was concerned that I won’t make it to my own presentation, but made it at the end and I think that it went well.

The Compass session itself worked out nicely. The session started at 10 PM and went well into 11:30. It seems like people were really interested and the presentation itself went well with a working searchable Spring Petclinic sample up and running. The session did not go into main Compass API and programmatic usage, but rather went into how it can integrate simply with Spring Petclinic. The slides can be found here.

At least one good think came out from the conference, a really cool Compass feature for parallel indexing (within the same JVM). I will blog about it more once it is wrapped up and committed. Well, there is always Spring One in Europe …