Indexing data from a database using Data Import Handler

One of our clients has a problem. His database of users grows to such a size that even a simple SQL select takes too much time, and he seeks how to improve the search times. Of course, he has heard about Solr, but he doesn't want to generate XML or any other data format and push it to Solr; he would like the data to be fetched. What can we do about it? Well, there is one thing—we can use one of the contribute modules of Solr, which is the Data Import Handler. This task will show you how to configure the basic setup of the Data Import Handler and how to use it.

How to do it...

Let's assume that we have a database table. To select users from our table, we use the following SQL query:

SELECT user_id, user_name FROM users

The response might look like this:

| user_id | user_name     |
| 1       | John Kowalski |
| 2       | Amanda Looks  |

We also have a second table called users_description, where we store the descriptions of...