Details
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Improvement
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Status: Closed
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Minor
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Resolution: Fixed
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None
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None
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New
Description
Solr's UnInvertedField lets you quickly lookup all terms ords for a
given doc/field.
Like, FieldCache, it inverts the index to produce this, and creates a
RAM-resident data structure holding the bits; but, unlike FieldCache,
it can handle multiple values per doc, and, it does not hold the term
bytes in RAM. Rather, it holds only term ords, and then uses
TermsEnum to resolve ord -> term.
This is great eg for faceting, where you want to use int ords for all
of your counting, and then only at the end you need to resolve the
"top N" ords to their text.
I think this is a useful core functionality, and we should move most
of it into Lucene's core. It's a good complement to FieldCache. For
this first baby step, I just move it into core and refactor Solr's
usage of it.
After this, as separate issues, I think there are some things we could
explore/improve:
- The first-pass that allocates lots of tiny byte[] looks like it
could be inefficient. Maybe we could use the byte slices from the
indexer for this...
- We can improve the RAM efficiency of the TermIndex: if the codec
supports ords, and we are operating on one segment, we should just
use it. If not, we can use a more RAM-efficient data structure,
eg an FST mapping to the ord.
- We may be able to improve on the main byte[] representation by
using packed ints instead of delta-vInt?
- Eventually we should fold this ability into docvalues, ie we'd
write the byte[] image at indexing time, and then loading would be
fast, instead of uninverting