[Xapian-discuss] Xapian 1.1.0 (was Re: Size of the index)

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 12:39:39PM +0200, Henry wrote:
> "...This change reduced the size of gmane's compacted postlist.DB by 44%!"
> 
> Any idea when that new format will see the light of day in stable?

Not totally, but sometime in 2009 is a pretty safe bet.

We've decided that we have a lot of changes we want to merge, but SVN
trunk is in a good state, so we'd like to make it easy for people to
give it a spin, and even use it in production if they wish (at least
two sites already are).

So we're going to try a new scheme - Xapian 1.1.x will be a "development
series".  Exactly what we mean by that is now documented on the wiki here:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/RoadMap

Once we've merged in all the changes and addressed all the tickets
marked for 1.1.*, we'll make a 1.2.0 release which will be "stable".

But depending on your outlook, you may find 1.1.x is stable enough for
you - if you avoid features marked "experimental" and are aware of the
weaker ABI and development backend compatibility promises, then it
should be pretty solid.

I'd hope we can get to 1.2.0 within a few months, though I haven't yet
looked at all the branches we're hoping to merge.  At some point we need
to just say "that's enough", but I think it's too early to set a firm
deadline date right now.

> 44% will make an incredible difference in so many ways...  of course,  
> this is dependent on your index structure, etc, but still.

Yes, the percentage varies but I don't seem to have noted down any
others.  And this is just for the one table, though the postlist table
is quite large and caching lots of it should really help performance
so reducing its size is a big deal.

Cheers,
    Olly