Released on August 27, 2024, this maintenance release includes the new Neural Hybrid Search capability, as well as upgrades to Solr, Kubernetes, Zookeeper, and some bug fixes. To learn more, skip to the release notes.

Platform Support and Component Versions

Kubernetes platform support

Lucidworks has tested and validated support for the following Kubernetes platform and versions:
  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): 1.28, 1.29, 1.30
For more information on Kubernetes version support, see the Kubernetes support policy.

Component versions

The following table details the versions of key components that may be critical to deployments and upgrades.
ComponentVersion
Solrfusion-solr 5.9.5 (based on Solr 9.6.1)
ZooKeeper3.9.1
Spark3.2.2
Ingress ControllersNginx, Ambassador (Envoy), GKE Ingress Controller Istio not supported.
More information about support dates can be found at Lucidworks Fusion Product Lifecycle.

New Features

Managed Fusion 5.9.5 introduces Neural Hybrid Search, a capability that combines lexical and semantic vector search. This feature includes:
  • A new index pipeline to vectorize fields with Lucidworks AI. See Configure the LWAI Vectorize pipeline.
  • A new query pipeline to set up Neural Hybrid Search with Lucidworks AI. See Configure the LWAI Neural Hybrid Search pipeline.
  • Query and index stages for vectorizing text using Lucidworks AI. See LWAI Vectorize Query stage and LWAI Vectorize Field stage.
  • Query and index stages for vectorizing text with Seldon. See Seldon Vectorize Query stage and Seldon Vectorize Field stage.
  • A new query stage for hybrid search that works with Lucidworks AI or Seldon. See Hybrid Query stage.
  • A new service, lwai-gateway, provides a secure, authenticated connection between Managed Fusion and your Lucidworks AI-hosted models.
    See Lucidworks AI Gateway for details.
  • Solr config changes to support dense vector dynamic fields.
  • A custom Solr plugin containing a new vectorSimilarity QParser that will not be available in Apache Solr until 9.7.
LucidAcademyLucidworks offers free training to help you get started.The Course for Neural Hybrid Search focuses on how neural hybrid search combines lexical and semantic search to improve the relevance and accuracy of results:
Neural Hybrid SearchPlay Button
Visit the LucidAcademy to see the full training catalog.

Configure use case for embedding

In the LWAI Vectorize Field stage, you can specify the use case for your embedding model. To learn how to configure your embedding use case, see the following demonstration:

Fine tune lexical and semantic settings

The Hybrid Query stage is highly customizable. You can lower the Min Return Vector Similarity threshold for vector results to include more semantic results. For example, a lower threshold would return “From Dusk Till Dawn” when querying night against a movie dataset. A higher threshold prioritizes high scoring results and in this case only returns movie names with night in the title. To learn how to configure the Hybrid Query stage, see the following demonstration:

Vector dimension size

There is no limitation on vector dimension sizes. If you’re setting up vector search and Neural Hybrid Search with an embedding model with large dimensions, simply configure your managed-schema to support the appropriate dimension. See Configure Neural Hybrid Search.

Improvements

  • Managed Fusion now supports Kubernetes 1.30 for GKE. Refer to Kubernetes documentation at Kubernetes v1.30 for more information.
  • Solr has been upgraded to 9.6.1.
  • Zookeeper has been upgraded to 3.9.1.
  • The default value for kafka.logRetentionBytes is increased to 5 GB. This improvement helps prevent failed datasource jobs due to full disk space. Refer to Troubleshoot failed datasource jobs.
  • There is a new AI category in the Add a new pipeline stage dropdown for Query and Index Pipelines. This category contains the new stages for Neural Hybrid Search, as well as existing machine learning and AI stages. AI subgroup
  • The Managed Fusion migration script is updated to align with changes from the Solr upgrade. The migration script:
    • Removes the unused configuration, <circuitBreaker>, from solrconfig.xml. Solr no longer supports this configuration.
    • Removes the query response writer of class solr.XSLTResponseWriter.
    • Comments out processors of type solr.StatelessScriptUpdateProcessorFactory.
    • Removes <bool name="preferLocalShards"/> element from request handler.
    • Changes cache class attribute of elements "filterCache", "cache", "documentCache", "queryResultCache" to solr.search.CaffeineCache.
    • Removes keepShortTerm attribute from filter of class solr.NGramFilterFactory.
  • Added the parameter job-expiration-duration-seconds for remote connectors that lets you configure the timeout value. Refer to Configure Remote V2 Connectors.
  • Added additional diagnostics between the connectors-backend and fusion-indexing services.
  • Added more detail to the messages that appear in the Managed Fusion UI when a connector job fails.
  • Added the reset action parameter to the subscriptions/{id}/refresh?action=some-action POST API endpoint. Calling reset will clear the subscription indexing topic from pending documents. See Indexing APIs.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed an issue that prevented successful configuration of new Kerberos security realms for authentication of external applications.

Deprecations

For full details on deprecations, see Deprecations and Removals. With the release of Solr supported embeddings and Solr Semantic Vector Search, Lucidworks is deprecating Milvus. The following Milvus query stages are deprecated and will be removed in a future release:
  • Milvus Ensemble Query Stage
  • Milvus Query Stage
  • Milvus Response Update Query Stage
Use Seldon or Lucidworks AI vector query stages instead.

Removals

For more information, see Deprecations and Removals.

Bitnami removal

By August 28, 2025, Fusion’s Helm chart will reference internally built open-source images instead of Bitnami images due to changes in how they host images.