I am looking to import entries to my SOLR server by using the DIH, connecting to an external PostgreSQL server using the JDBC driver. I will be importing about 50,000 entries each time.
Is connecting to an external SQL server for my data unreliable or risky, or is it instead perfectly reasonable?
My only alternative is to export the SQL file on the other server, download the SQL file to my SOLR server, import it to my Solr servers copy of PostgreSQL and then run the DIH on the local database.
The way you're using it is pretty much why the DIH exists. Otherwise, you could just use the /update handler with XML documents. The core I'm working on right now regularly indexes 11,000,000 rows per batch.