On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 8:35 PM Paul Davis <paul.joseph.da...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > It was therefore felt that having an immediate "Not ready" signal for > just _some_ calls to _find, based on the type of backing index, was a bad > and confusing api. > > > > We also discussed _find calls where the user does not specify an index, > and concluded that we would be free to choose between using the _all_docs > index (which is always up to date but rarely the best index for a given > selector) or blocking to update a better but stale index. > > > > Summary-ing my summarisation; > > > > 1) if you specify an index, we'll use it even if we have to update it, > no matter how long that takes. > > 2) if you don't specify an index, it's the dealers choice. The details > here may change in point releases. > > > > So it seems there's still a bit of confusion on what the consensus is > here. The way that I had thought this would work is that we'd do > something like such: > > 1. If user specifies and index, use it even if we have to wait > 2. If an index is built that can be used, use it > 3. If an index is building that can be used, wait for it > 4. As a last resort use _all_docs > > Discussing with Garren on the PR he's of the opinion that we should > skip step 3 and just go directly to using _all_docs if nothing is > built. > I just want to clarify step 3. I'm ok with using an index that still needs to be built as long as there is no other built index that can service the request. So the big thing for me is to always prefer a built index over a building index. In the situation where there is only 1 building index versus all docs I'm ok with using the building index. > My main assumption is that most cases where a user is creating an > index and then wanting to run a query with it are in the > design/exploration phase of learning the feature or designing an index > to use. In that scenario if we skip waiting it seems likely that a > user could easily be led to believe that an index creation "worked" > for their selector when in reality it was just backed by _all_docs. > > The other reason for preferring to wait for an index to finish > building is that the UI for the normal case of creating indexes is a > bit awkward. Having to run a polling loop around checking the index > status seems suboptimal in most cases. > > Am I missing other cases that would benefit from not waiting and just > using _all_docs? > > Paul >
