What is extremely expensive for you? We find the overheads on storing & processing the data are much more than the cost of the license, on a per GB basis.
Without knowing details of exactly what you are doing it's difficult to comment on your problems with queries. It's true that something like Solr gives you more control over the indexing process, so you can optimize it more for specific queries. Splunk tends to rely more on saved searches (and the new search acceleration feature).
Without knowing details of exactly what you are doing it's difficult to comment on your problems with queries. It's true that something like Solr gives you more control over the indexing process, so you can optimize it more for specific queries. Splunk tends to rely more on saved searches (and the new search acceleration feature).