Reference Manual 3.9-SNAPSHOT

Distributed Query How Distributed Query Works Indexing Queries

Hazelcast distributed queries will run on each member in parallel and will return only the results to the caller. Then, on the caller side, the results will be merged.

When a query runs on a member, Hazelcast will iterate through all the owned entries and find the matching ones. This can be made faster by indexing the mostly queried fields, just like you would do for your database. Indexing will add overhead for each write operation but queries will be a lot faster. If you query your map a lot, make sure to add indexes for the most frequently queried fields. For example, if you do an active and age < 30 query, make sure you add an index for the active and age fields. The following example code does that by:

  • getting the map from the Hazelcast instance, and
  • adding indexes to the map with the IMap addIndex method.
IMap map = hazelcastInstance.getMap( "employees" );
// ordered, since we have ranged queries for this field
map.addIndex( "age", true );
// not ordered, because boolean field cannot have range
map.addIndex( "active", false );

Indexing Ranged Queries

IMap.addIndex(fieldName, ordered) is used for adding index. For each indexed field, if you have ranged queries such as age>30, age BETWEEN 40 AND 60, then you should set the ordered parameter to true. Otherwise, set it to false.

Configuring IMap Indexes

Also, you can define IMap indexes in configuration. An example is shown below.

<map name="default">
  ...
  <indexes>
    <index ordered="false">name</index>
    <index ordered="true">age</index>
  </indexes>
</map>

You can also define IMap indexes using programmatic configuration, as in the example below.

mapConfig.addMapIndexConfig( new MapIndexConfig( "name", false ) );
mapConfig.addMapIndexConfig( new MapIndexConfig( "age", true ) );

The following is the Spring declarative configuration for the same sample.

<hz:map name="default">
  <hz:indexes>
    <hz:index attribute="name"/>
    <hz:index attribute="age" ordered="true"/>
  </hz:indexes>
</hz:map>



image NOTE: Non-primitive types to be indexed should implement Comparable.

Indexing Attributes with ValueExtractor

You can also define custom attributes that may be referenced in predicates, queries and indexes. Custom attributes can be defined by implementing a ValueExtractor. Please see the Indexing Custom Attributes section for details.