On 3/6/07, Waters, Chris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In ferret, and especially when using acts_as_ferret, it is easy to specify > many fields. What is the cost of using a lot of fields from a performance > perspective? Is each field searched separately, or are they combined > together in the inverted index.
Hi Chris, Each field is searched separately so the more fields you search the longer the search will take. Also note that there shouldn't be any difference in the time to search a single field whether you have 1 field or 1 million. It will only take longer if you search all 1 million fields. > As an extreme example, if I made every word in my documents a separate field > (so the first word in each document was field 1 and the second word was > field 2, etc) would this be significantly less efficient than treating the > entire document as a single field? > > > > I am not doing something quite as bad as this hypothetical example, but I am > investigating different ways to organize some data. I'm not sure exactly what you want to do but you may want to look at span queries. These queries allow you to search based on the positions of the terms in the document. But perhaps your hypothetical is misleading me. Cheers, Dave -- Dave Balmain http://www.davebalmain.com/ _______________________________________________ Ferret-talk mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ferret-talk
