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What is in a Lucene index? Adrien Grand, Software Engineer, Elasticsearch

LuceneSolrRevolution · 80.5K views · 2013-12-15 · 1:04:30

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Overview

Elasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as an instructive, easy-to-follow look at Lucene internals from a core committer.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2019–2020

Topics

Databases & storageAlgorithms & data structures
Search by tags
luceneelasticsearchfull-text searchinverted indexsearch engines

What people said

drej · 2020-01 · Strong recommendation

I can super highly recommend talks by Adrien Grand on Lucene and Elasticsearch. They are super instructive yet easy to follow. [VIDEO] [LINK]

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stereosteve · 2020-06 · Recommendation

This is excellent. I was recently reviewing Lucene concepts and found this video really good: [VIDEO] Also this site has a series of Lucene articles that are pretty nice. The one on Term Vectors in particular: [LINK] Based on some quick research it seems like Lucene is already using a sorted skip data structure for the posting list, so I wonder why they had to do a custom implementation? Perhaps it has to do with their custom Document ID scheme and how they want to preserve order in the Posting List being different from the default behavior. It also sounds like searchers are searching on indexes as they're being written, and there is some custom coordination around visibility, which might require diverging from Lucene default behavior. Either way, pretty impressive!

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ddorian43 · 2019-09 · Recommendation

This is extremely high level. A nice view of how lucene internals work by core committer Adrien Grand: [LINK] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by LuceneSolrRevolution, played through YouTube.

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