In-place versus re-build versus re-merge: index maintenance strategies for text retrieval systems

  • Authors:
  • Nicholas Lester;Justin Zobel;Hugh E. Williams

  • Affiliations:
  • RMIT University, Victoria, Australia;RMIT University, Victoria, Australia;RMIT University, Victoria, Australia

  • Venue:
  • ACSC '04 Proceedings of the 27th Australasian conference on Computer science - Volume 26
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Indexes are the key technology underpinning efficient text search. A range of algorithms have been developed for fast query evaluation and for index creation, but update algorithms for high-performance indexes have not been evaluated or even fully described. In this paper, we explore the three main alternative strategies for index update: in-place update, index merging, and complete re-build. Our experiments with large volumes of web data show that re-merge is for large numbers of updates the fastest approach, but in-place update is suitable when the rate of update is low or buffer size is limited.