Thanks, that answers my question. My example was purely hypothetical, but I really am contemplating having hundreds of fields.
Regards, Chris > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Balmain > Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 7:22 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [Ferret-talk] Cost of using many fields > > 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 > _______________________________________________ Ferret-talk mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/ferret-talk
