SearchStax Help Center

Now and then, a SearchStax Managed Search service customer decides to clear all collections and configurations from their Solr deployment and start over. The easiest way to do this depends on your precise situation. On this page we discuss some of the pros and cons of the various methods.

Delete the Deployment and Create a New One

If you have a very simple, self-service deployment (“silver” SLA), the easiest way to clear the system is to delete the deployment and create a new one.

Pros:

• Very simple. Anybody can do it in just a few minutes.

Cons:

• Billing for the two deployments (old and new) will overlap by one day. There will be a small bump in your credit-card bill for that month.
• Creating a new deployment creates a new Solr HTTP Endpoint. Your external search application will have to be reconfigured to use it.
• Alerts, IP filters, Basic Auth accounts are all deleted along with the deployment.

Restore an Empty Backup

The SearchStax Backup and Restore feature automatically wipes all data from a deployment at the beginning a restore operation. You can create an empty backup file and restore it to the deployment you want to clear.

1. Create a small, single-node deployment using the same Managed Search Provider and Region as the deployment you want to clear.
2. Create a one-time backup of the empty deployment.
3. Delete the empty deployment.
4. [Optional] Make a backup of the deployment you want to clear.
5. Restore the empty backup to the deployment you want to clear.

Pros:

• Very simple. It’s all point-and-click.
• Preserves HTTP endpoint, alerts, IP filters, Basic Auth accounts, billing, infrastructure.

Cons:

• You must have a credit card on file with SearchStax.
• There is a one-day charge for the single-node deployment.
• There is a small charge for creating the one-time backup.
• It is hard to estimate how long it will take to restore the backup.

Manually Deleting Collections and Configs

To manually clear a deployment, you have to delete the collections and the Solr configs.

Pros:

• There are no additional charges. No credit card is required.
• You have positive control. You can remove some of the collections/configs while leaving others.
• Preserves HTTP endpoint, alerts, IP filters, Basic Auth accounts, billing, infrastructure.

Cons:

• You may need to write a script or use command-line utilities.
• Collections are deleted one at a time. You have to visit each collection on each server.

Delete Collections

There are two ways to manually delete collections:

• Delete from Solr Dashboard: Access the Solr Dashboard. Navigate to Collections. Select a collection. Use the red Delete button.

• Delete Using Solr API: If you are familiar with scripting, the Apache Solr API has a Delete Collection function.

Deleting Zookeeper Configurations

There are two ways to reach into Zookeeper and delete configsets:

• Use the zkcli “clear /configs” function. You can delete an individual configuration or all of them at once.
  zkcli.sh -zkhost <zookeeper endpoint> -cmd clear /configs
• Delete Using Provisioning API: If you are familiar with writing scripts, the SearchStax account > deployment > zookeeper-config > delete function removes one Zookeeper configuration at a time.