Hi Jeff,

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 4:49 PM, Jeff Schnitzer <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 9:32 AM, Nick Johnson (Google)
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hi Jeff,
> > Unindexed properties are excluded from all indexing, not just from
> indexing
> > by the built-in indexes.
> > -Nick Johnson
>
> Ah ha.  The next question then is - why?
>
> This current arrangement has some particularly nasty consequences:
>
> 1) If you want a custom index across 3 properties, you are now forced
> to maintain seven indexes total - the three single-property ASC
> indexes, the three single-property DESC indexes, and the actual custom
> index.
>

None of the built in indexes require 'maintenance'. There's also only a
single desc, and a single asc index for all properties.


>
> 2) If you want to create a custom index across a property that does
> not currently have a single-property index, you must manually go
> through and reprocess you entire dataset.  The automatic index
> building isn't automatic.
>

If you mean that you want to index a field that was previously listed as an
unindexed field then yes, you do.

-Nick Johnson


> On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much benefit to the
> current approach.  It does provide the ability to make rdbms-like
> partial indexes in custom indexes as well as single-property indexes,
> but it seems like any minor gain is going to be overshadowed by the
> fact that you're now maintaining quite a large number of additional
> indexes.
>
> Furthermore, the only way to access this partial index functionality
> is with the low-level API.  At the higher level APIs, you can only
> flag a property as unindexed or not.  If the user wants a property to
> be excluded from a custom index... they can easily remove it from the
> datastore-indexes.xml/yaml.  So this default doesn't buy you anything
> and actually costs you a lot of flexibility and extra index overhead.
>
> Unless I'm missing something?
>
> Jeff
>
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-- 
Nick Johnson, Developer Programs Engineer, App Engine
Google Ireland Ltd. :: Registered in Dublin, Ireland, Registration Number:
368047

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