[LUCENE-4272] another idea for updatable fields

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Robert Muir
• Created: 30/Jul/12 19:37
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 13:23

Description

I've been reviewing the ideas for updatable fields and have an alternative
proposal that I think would address my biggest concern:

• not slowing down searching

When I look at what Solr and Elasticsearch do here, by basically reindexing from stored fields, I think they solve a lot of the problem: users don't have to "rebuild" their document from scratch just to update one tiny piece.

But I think we can do this more efficiently: by avoiding reindexing of the unaffected fields.

The basic idea is that we would require term vectors for this approach (as the already store a serialized indexed version of the doc), and so we could just take the other pieces from the existing vectors for the doc.

I dont think we should discard the idea because vectors are slow/big today, this seems like something we could fix.

Personally I like the idea of not slowing down search performance to solve the problem, I think we should really start from that angle and work towards making the indexing side more efficient, not vice-versa.

Issue Links

• depends upon: LUCENE-1888 Provide Option to Store Payloads on the Term Vector
• is related to: LUCENE-4258 Incremental Field Updates through Stacked Segments
• relates to: LUCENE-4599 Compressed term vectors