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feat(python): add post filtering for full text search (#739)
Closes #721 fts will return results as a pyarrow table. Pyarrow tables has a `filter` method but it does not take sql filter strings (only pyarrow compute expressions). Instead, we do one of two things to support `tbl.search("keywords").where("foo=5").limit(10).to_arrow()`: Default path: If duckdb is available then use duckdb to execute the sql filter string on the pyarrow table. Backup path: Otherwise, write the pyarrow table to a lance dataset and then do `to_table(filter=<filter>)` Neither is ideal. Default path has two issues: 1. requires installing an extra library (duckdb) 2. duckdb mangles some fields (like fixed size list => list) Backup path incurs a latency penalty (~20ms on ssd) to write the resultset to disk. In the short term, once #676 is addressed, we can write the dataset to "memory://" instead of disk, this makes the post filter evaluate much quicker (ETA next week). In the longer term, we'd like to be able to evaluate the filter string on the pyarrow Table directly, one possibility being that we use Substrait to generate pyarrow compute expressions from sql string. Or if there's enough progress on pyarrow, it could support Substrait expressions directly (no ETA) --------- Co-authored-by: Will Jones <willjones127@gmail.com>
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@@ -29,8 +29,9 @@ uri = "data/sample-lancedb"
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db = lancedb.connect(uri)
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table = db.create_table("my_table",
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data=[{"vector": [3.1, 4.1], "text": "Frodo was a happy puppy"},
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{"vector": [5.9, 26.5], "text": "There are several kittens playing"}])
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data=[{"vector": [3.1, 4.1], "text": "Frodo was a happy puppy", "meta": "foo"},
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{"vector": [5.9, 26.5], "text": "Sam was a loyal puppy", "meta": "bar"},
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{"vector": [15.9, 6.5], "text": "There are several kittens playing"}])
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```
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@@ -64,10 +65,23 @@ table.create_fts_index(["text1", "text2"])
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Note that the search API call does not change - you can search over all indexed columns at once.
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## Filtering
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Currently the LanceDB full text search feature supports *post-filtering*, meaning filters are
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applied on top of the full text search results. This can be invoked via the familiar
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`where` syntax:
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```python
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table.search("puppy").limit(10).where("meta='foo'").to_list()
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```
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## Current limitations
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1. Currently we do not yet support incremental writes.
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If you add data after fts index creation, it won't be reflected
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in search results until you do a full reindex.
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If you add data after fts index creation, it won't be reflected
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in search results until you do a full reindex.
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2. We currently only support local filesystem paths for the fts index.
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This is a tantivy limitation. We've implemented an object store plugin
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but there's no way in tantivy-py to specify to use it.
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2. We currently only support local filesystem paths for the fts index.
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