dataimport handler tutorial

[Kevin]

Has anyone seen/written/could write a tutorial on adapting my sunspot installation to use a mysql dataimporthandler?  My database seems to get off enough I need to reindex this about once a month, and have the server down/slow for 3-4 hours is frustrating.

Unfortunately some of the "automatic" aspects of solr make it really hard to make head or tails of any dataimporthandler tutorials (like http://wiki.apache.org/solr/DIHQuickStart ), since I don't know my setup or where 

My impression is that it could be 1000x faster via dataimport handler, right?

How are the searchable blocks converted into schema.xml values, and is there any cache or file-based version of this I can access to build a relevant import?

Are boosts/etc impossible in a DIH?

Thanks,

Kevin