Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Compound Index Fields

Syntax: list of field(s) from select boxes, any order

These fields will be indexed along with Index Fields, but in the compound portion of the main search index. They are not searched by the text query, but are used to improve accuracy and performance for certain ancillary queries performed in addition to the main text search, such as when ordering results by last-modified date, or searching by Depth. The default values are Visited, Modified, Depth and Pop.

The selected fields may be in any order; they are used only when needed, unlike Index Fields, all of which are always searched by the user's text query. Note the following caveats:

Adding a field to Compound Index Fields will not help search performance if there is no main (text) query also, as the compound part of the index can only be used in conjunction with a text query.

Only a fixed-size amount of data can be stored in each row of each of the Compound Index Fields, so only fixed-size fields such as dates, integers, numbers, etc. should be chosen. If text data is used, all values for the field in the database should be small (a few characters) for best performance.

Parametric Search Set fields are not permitted in Compound Index Fields.

See the Parametric Search Indexes section (here) for more details on if and when to add Parametric Search fields to the Compound Index Fields. Note that as this is the same overall index as Index Fields, changing any of these fields will cause indexes to be rebuilt, which may take several minutes or more for large-data profiles. The old setting(s) will be used until the index rebuild is complete.