A few of us working on a book for casanadra and got to the point where we (well I did anyway) wanted to include an example of a non trivial inverted index.
I've been playing around with different ideas on how I could store the data and I've had a look at the previous threads that touched on the subject but with the 2 or 3 ideas I've seen on the list someone always points out something in the approach that punches a hole in it. I've been playing around with the idea of using a Columnfamily for the index where I store the terms as the key then each column name is a 64 bit long and its value is the doc id. If the column name represents a ranking for the doc id it stores and the compare with option is LongType then once a term is retrieved the first x amount of columns would represent the most related docs for that term. I'd go on in more detail but I'm using my phone to write this and I think that gets the idea across. Ofcourse my first thought to this is, is it scalable? In a system where possibly millions of docs are related to one term, is that a good idea to have potentially that many columns in one row all associated to the one row key which is the term? I just want to know what others think, if you have any suggestions or have a similar thing implemented and you're able to share. On a side note to that, there has been a bit of talk about secondary indexes in 0.7 can anyone shed some light on that, or point me to any presentation or the like where its mentioned so I can get a better idea of what its for. Thanks, Courtney