SolrCloud read-side fault tolerance

When a single shard from your collection fails to respond to the query, Solr will fail the whole request. This is good for most use cases, but not for all. Sometimes, you might like to show partial results so that your users can see at least some portion of the results. By default, this is not possible, but luckily Solr allows you to adapt to its behavior when it comes to such situations on per request basis. This recipe will show you how to force Solr to return even partial results.

Getting ready

We assume that we already have a running SolrCloud cluster with two nodes and a collection created with two leader shards and no replica. If you don't know how to do this, refer to the Creating a new SolrCloud cluster recipe in Chapter 7, In the Cloud. This recipe will show you how to create a new SolrCloud cluster and create a collection.

How to do it...

We indexed four sample documents to our Solr cluster. Two documents are placed in one shard and the other...