Native text index
This page talks about native text indices and corresponding search functionality in Apache Pinot.
Experimental
This index is experimental and should only be used for testing. It is not recommended for use in production.
Instead, use this text index.
Native text index
Pinot supports text indexing and search by building Lucene indices as sidecars to the main Pinot segments. While this is a great technique, it essentially limits the avenues of optimizations that can be done for Pinot specific use cases of text search.
How is Pinot different?
Pinot, like any other database/OLAP engine, does not need to conform to the entire full text search domain-specific language (DSL) that is traditionally used by full-text search (FTS) engines like ElasticSearch and Solr. In traditional SQL text search use cases, the majority of text searches belong to one of three patterns: prefix wildcard queries (like pino*
), postfix or suffix wildcard queries (like *inot
), and term queries (like pinot
).
Native text indices in Pinot
In Pinot, native text indices are built from the ground up. They use a custom text-indexing engine, coupled with Pinot's powerful inverted indices, to provide a fast text search experience.
The benefits are that native text indices are 80-120% faster than Lucene-based indices for the text search use cases mentioned above. They are also 40% smaller on disk.
Native text indices support real-time text search. For REALTIME
tables, native text indices allow data to be indexed in memory in the text index, while concurrently supporting text searches on the same index.
Historically, most text indices depend on the in-memory text index being written to first and then sealed, before searches are possible. This limits the freshness of the search, being near-real-time at best.
Native text indices come with a custom in-memory text index, which allows for real-time indexing and search.
Searching Native Text Indices
The function, TEXT\_CONTAINS
, supports text search on native text indices.
Examples:
TEXT\_CONTAINS
can be combined using standard boolean operators
Note: TEXT\_CONTAINS
supports regex and term queries and will work only on native indices. TEXT\_CONTAINS
supports standard regex patterns (as used by LIKE
in SQL Standard), so there might be some syntatical differences from Lucene queries.
Creating Native Text Indices
Native text indices are created using field configurations. To indicate that an index type is native, specify it using properties
in the field configuration:
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