codec – Flax http://www.flax.co.uk The Open Source Search Specialists Thu, 10 Oct 2019 09:03:26 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8 Updating individual fields in Lucene with a Redis-backed codec http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2012/06/22/updating-individual-fields-in-lucene-with-a-redis-backed-codec/ http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2012/06/22/updating-individual-fields-in-lucene-with-a-redis-backed-codec/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2012 09:55:44 +0000 http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/?p=801 A customer of ours has a potential search application which requires (largely for reasons of performance) the ability to update specific individual fields of Apache Lucene documents. This is not the first time that someone has asked for this functionality. … More

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A customer of ours has a potential search application which requires (largely for reasons of performance) the ability to update specific individual fields of Apache Lucene documents. This is not the first time that someone has asked for this functionality. However, until now, it has been impossible to change field values in a Lucene document without re-indexing the entire document. This was due to the write-once design of Lucene index segment files, which would necessitate re-writing the entire file if a single value changes.

However, the introduction of pluggable codecs in Lucene 4.0 means that the concrete representation of index segments has been abstracted away from search functionality, and can be specified by the codec designer. The motivation for this was to make it possible to experiment with new compression schemes and other innovations, however it may also make it possible to overcome the current limitation of whole-document-only updates.

Andrzej Bialecki has proposed a “stacked update” design on top of the Lucene index format, in which changed fields are represented by “diff” documents which “overlay” the values of an existing document. If the “diff” document does not contain a certain field, then the value is taken from the original, overlaid document. This design is currently a work in progress.

Approaching the challenge independently, we have started to experiment with an alternative design, which makes a clear distinction between updatable and non-updateable fields. This is arguably a limitation, but one which may not be important in many practical applications (e.g. adding user tags to documents in a corpus). Non-updatable fields are stored using the standard Lucene codec, while updatable fields are stored externally by a codec that uses Redis, an open-source, flexible, fast key-value store. Updates to these fields could then be made directly in the Redis store using the JRedis library.

We have written a minimal, 2-day proof of concept, which can be checked out with:

svn checkout http://flaxcode.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/LuceneRedisCodec

There is still a significant amount of work to be done to make this approach robust and performant (e.g. when Lucene merges segments, the Redis document IDs will have to be remapped). At this stage we would welcome any comments and suggestions about our approach from anyone who is interested in this area of functionality.

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