Hi, we are building an application using Lucene and we have HUGE data sets (our index contains millions and millions and millions of documents), which obviously cause us very important problems when sorting. In fact, we disabled sorting completely because the servers were just exploding when trying to sort results in RAM. The users using the system can search for whatever they want, so we never know how many results will be returned - a search can return 10 documents (no problem with sorting) or 10,000,000 (huge sorting problems).
I woke up this morning and had a flash : is it possible with Lucene to have a "natural sorting" of documents? For example, let's say I have 3 columns I want to be able to sort by : first name, last name, email; I would have 3 different indexes with the very same data but with a different primary key for sorting. I know it's far fetched, and I have never seen anything like that since I use Lucene, but we're just desperate... how people do to have huge data sets, a lot of users, and sort!? Thanks, Mike
