This page describes configuring the range index for Apache Pinot
Range indexing allows you to get better performance for queries that involve filtering over a range.
It would be useful for a query like the following:
A range index is a variant of an inverted index, where instead of creating a mapping from values to columns, we create mapping of a range of values to columns. You can use the range index by setting the following config in the table configuration.
Range index is supported for both dictionary and raw-encoded columns.
A good thumb rule is to use a range index when you want to apply range predicates on metric columns that have a very large number of unique values. This is because using an inverted index for such columns will create a very large index that is inefficient in terms of storage and performance.