lance-format / lance-format/lance

Store a compressed bitmap alongside the index pages

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A-index enhancement
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
7.1k
Forks
852
Avg merge
3d 18h
Merged PRs (30d)
272

Description

When we match a page in the btree search we then delegate to the sub-index to search that page. This works well for high cardinality data and equality / inequality searches. However, it can be inefficient when the data is low cardinality since we have to search a very large page (or many small pages)

Luckily, when we search the btree, we can know if a page is entirely included in the result. In other words, if a page has min: 5, max: 10 and the query is value < 20 then we don't need to search the page because we know we want all of the rows in the page. If we had stored a compressed bitmap of all the row ids in the page then all we would need to do would be to load that.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing the btree search and the delegated sub-index search described in the issue, then identify how index pages and their row ids are stored and loaded. Done means storing a compressed bitmap alongside each index page and loading it when the btree shows that the page is entirely included in the query result.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
databases, performance, search
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
32/100

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