[LUCENE-4643] PackedInts: convenience classes to write blocks of packed ints

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Adrien Grand
• Reporter: Adrien Grand
• Created: 21/Dec/12 15:19
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 13:35
• Resolved: 08/Jan/13 11:23

Description

It is often useful to divide a packed stream into fixed blocks which are all compressed independently:

• if your sequence of ints is very large, you won't have to buffer everything into memory to compute the required number of bits per value,
• the compression ratio will be better in case of rare extreme values.

The only drawback compared to the original PackedInts API is that the stream cannot be directly used to deserialize a random-access PackedInts.Reader (but for sequential access, this is just fine).

Issue Links

• relates to: LUCENE-4609 Write a PackedIntsEncoder/Decoder for facets