If ‘body’ field is indexed=true, Shawn’s query should give you results where body=“” as well as where body field doesn’t exist at all. Also, I agree that the format body:[* TO *] is much faster for high cardinality fields (which most likely “body” is).
-Rahul On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 7:46 PM Shawn Heisey <apa...@elyograg.org> wrote: > On 7/28/2021 11:48 AM, mtn search wrote: > > Thanks Walter, Alex! > > > > Yes I regularly use - Search for *:* -body:* > > That syntax, while it works for finding docs where the body field is > entirely missing, is not the best option. You'll likely find that this > syntax is MUCH faster, and returns identical results: > > *:* -body:[* TO *] > > The reason it's faster is that * by itself is a wildcard query, and > unless the cardinality of the field is very low, those are extremely > inefficient. I would expect a field named "body" to have cardinality in > the millions or billions, for sufficiently large indexes. > > Note that neither of these queries will find docs where the value is the > empty string, because I believe that IS matched by either a wildcard > query or a range query. > > Thanks, > Shawn >
