#Indexing

Earlier in this series, we've presented four different demo applications for iKnow, illustrating how its unique bottom-up approach allows users to explore the concepts and context of their unstructured data and then leverage these insights to implement real-world use cases. We started small and simple with core exploration through the Knowledge Portal, then organized our records according to content with the Set Analysis Demo, organized our domain knowledge using the Dictionary Builder Demo and finally build complex rules to extract nontrivial patterns from text with the Rules Builder Demo.

This time, we'll dive into a different area of the iKnow feature set: iFind. Where iKnow's core APIs are all about exploration and leveraging those results programmatically in applications and analytics, iFind is focused specifically on search scenarios in a pure SQL context. We'll be presenting a simple search portal implemented in Zen that showcases iFind's main features.

I have a production system that has a large dataset of about 2 million rows. I need to create an index on a property but don't want it available to queries until the index is fully populated. Is there a way I can create the indexed, fire off the build, then "activate" the index so queries can use it.

The problem I face is the minute I create the index queries start returning zero rows because it starts using the index. As I start building it starts returning qualifying rows for those it has indexed but misses those not yet processed.

The object and relational data models of the Caché database support three types of indexes, which are standard, bitmap, and bitslice. In addition to these three native types, developers can declare their own custom types of indexes and use them in any classes since version 2013.1. For example, iFind text indexes use that mechanism.