Multiple indexes?

Ruby Apps Ferret
1

Hi,

   I'm indexing records from different database tables and they have

identical column names in many cases. Does this mean I have to create
different indexes for each table?

TIA,
Vamsee.

2

Not necessarily. If you index the table name as a separate field for
each document added to the index, it can be used (as a TermQuery
clause) to constrain searches for just documents from a specific
table. The acts_as_ferret posted to the Ferret wiki does this, for
example.

Erik
3

Erik H. wrote:

Not necessarily. If you index the table name as a separate field for
each document added to the index, it can be used (as a TermQuery
clause) to constrain searches for just documents from a specific
table. The acts_as_ferret posted to the Ferret wiki does this, for
example.

Thanks, Erik. That raises the obvious question I should’ve asked before

  • which is a better approach and which is faster?

TIA,
Vamsee.

4

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 06:05:31PM +0530, Vamsee K. wrote:

  • which is a better approach and which is faster?
    Imho this depends on how your queries look like.

If you want to run queries across all tables, having only one index
should be faster because no merging of results from different indexes
has to take place.

On the other hand, if you want to query only data of one of your tables,
having a dedicated index for that table should be faster.

But unless you have huge amounts of data in your indexes, in practice
the difference in speed won’t matter. At least that’s what I experienced
with Java lucene.

Jens

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