lance-format / lance-format/lance

Add fast "max count" method

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#5,272 2 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@steFaiz is already working on this.

Since Nov 19, 2025.

enhancement
Dominant language
Rust
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

A count_rows query (with a filter) will currently be fastest when all columns in the filter are indexed with exact-answer indexes. However, if there is any portion of the filter either not covered by an index or covered by a partiial-match index, then we have to do a bunch of I/O to answer the query.

Some users are creating filters like expr1 AND expr2 AND expr3 AND ... AND exprN. Some of these expressions have an index and some do not. As a result the query can take a while. The user would like a "max count rows" variation where we simply use the criteria that matches the indexes and discard the other criteria, quickly returning an estimate of the maximum number of matches.

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