Did you swap the two examples below?  They seem to contradict your 
assertions :)

Also - I'd want to be careful about accounting for caching/paging 
behavior in the server.  You can get wildly varying timing results on 
the first and subsequent invocations of the same query (presumably the 
index has been brought into memory then).

-Mike

On 06/02/2011 10:37 AM, Steve Mallen wrote:
> Hi Damon,
>
> Having run a couple of tests, it seems that doing [$start to $end] is in
> fact much slower than using limit from a start value.  Running:
>
>       cts:element-values( xs:QName('lexi'), ("Z"), "limit=1000" )
>
> takes 4 seconds
>
> while
>
>       cts:element-values( xs:QName('lexi') )[1700000 to 1701000]
>
> take 0.003 seconds.
>
> So it seems that the second query is not optimised and in fact loads all
> the values into memory first before doing the array slice.
>
> Is this what you expect?
>
> Cheers,
> -Steve
>
> On 02/06/2011 14:27, Damon Feldman wrote:
>
>    
>> Steve,
>>
>> xdmp:spawn() with a high task server queue size will work fine. You could 
>> also use CORB, which is a java utility.
>>
>> As for your existing approach, cts:element-values[$start to $end] will work 
>> fine and return an empty sequence past the end of the values, and will be 
>> optimized. To get the total number you can count them, since this is a 
>> lexicon-only function and returns from the indexes without much overhead - 
>> no estimate is necessary.
>>
>> Yours,
>> Damon
>> ________________________________________
>> From: [email protected] 
>> [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Steve Mallen 
>> [[email protected]]
>> Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 6:32 AM
>> To: General MarkLogic Developer Discussion
>> Subject: [MarkLogic Dev General] Efficient iterating over values from a 
>> large lexicon
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm having problems processing a large lexicon of values and wondered if
>> anyone had done something similar or had any ideas of how best to deal
>> with them.
>>
>> Basically, I've got a set of several million distinct values, and I want
>> to precompute a bunch of statistics for each of them (so that I can then
>> facet/sort values on the computed statistic).  So, my plan is to fetch
>> all the values from the lexicon (storing them in a temp file, say), and
>> then run an XQuery on each value and store the resulting information in
>> a document (i.e. one stat document per value).  I cannot do this in a
>> single query as it would take far too long to iterate over all values
>> and for all the computations and inserts.
>>
>> But I can't seem to figure out the best way of fetching and iterating
>> over a Lexicon in MarkLogic (to pre-fetch the full set of lexicon
>> values).  In SQL, I'd use a CURSOR to fetch the values one by one, and
>> then close the cursor at the end.  There doesn't seem to be an analogous
>> concept in XQuery or XCC.  I've tried something along the following lines:
>>
>>        (cts:element-values( xs:QName(lexi) ))[$start to $end]
>>
>> and fetching the values in blocks until I run out of values but I'm
>> worried that this isn't very efficient, and I've got this nagging doubt
>> that the above will never return the empty sequence when $start is past
>> the end of the values.  I'm not even sure how I should get a count of
>> the number of distinct values (xdmp:estimate doesn't work on the result
>> of cts:element-values()).
>>
>> So - do you guys know of a way of efficiently iterating over a large set
>> of lexicon values without timing out the query on the server?
>>
>> If I'm missing an obvious solution, please let me know...
>>
>> -Steve
>>
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