[Xapian-discuss] Clarification of values, data, fields, and prefixed terms

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Tue Sep 4 17:25:19 BST 2007


On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 11:31:24AM -0400, Deron Meranda wrote:
> If in some future release values were made more efficient then the
> need for data fields would mostly go away.

I think there's inevitably a trade-off here, and that the distinction
will probably remain useful.  It's perhaps analagous to whether a
field in an RDBMS has an index or not - the system could just index
every field, but that would be wasteful for most uses.  Or it could try
to be smart and create an index if you use the field in a certain way
but then it'll be very slow the first time you do.  So RDBMS systems
generally require you to specify which fields to index explicitly.

Cheers,
    Olly



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