Merge pull request #1146 from tantivy-search/sorting_doc

add sorting to book

doc/src/SUMMARY.md

@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@
 - [Segments](./basis.md)
 - [Defining your schema](./schema.md)
 - [Facetting](./facetting.md)
+- [Index Sorting](./index_sorting.md)
 - [Innerworkings](./innerworkings.md)
   - [Inverted index](./inverted_index.md)
 - [Best practise](./inverted_index.md)

doc/src/index_sorting.md

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+
+- [Index Sorting](#index-sorting)
+    + [Motivation](#motivation)
+        * [Compression](#compression)
+        * [Top-N Optimization](#top-n-optimization)
+        * [Pruning](#pruning)
+    + [Usage](#usage)
+
+# Index Sorting
+
+Tantivy allows you to sort the index according to a property.
+
+### Motivation
+
+Presorting an index has several advantages:
+
+- Compression
+- Top-N Optimization
+- Pruning
+
+##### Compression
+
+When data is sorted it is easier to compress the data. E.g. the numbers sequence [5, 2, 3, 1, 4] would be sorted to [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. 
+If we apply delta encoding this list would be unsorted [5, -3, 1, -2, 3] vs. [1, 1, 1, 1, 1].
+Compression is mainly affected on the fast field of the sorted property, every thing else is likely unaffected. 
+
+##### Top-N Optimization
+
+When data is presorted by a field and search queries request sorting by the same field, we can leverage the natural order of the documents. 
+E.g. if the data is sorted by timestamp and want the top n newest docs containing a term, we can simply leveraging the order of the docids.
+
+Note: Tantivy 0.16 does not do this optimization yet.
+
+##### Pruning
+
+Let's say we want all documents and want to apply the filter `>= 2010-08-11`. When the data is sorted, we could make a lookup in the fast field to find the docid range and use this as the filter.
+
+Note: Tantivy 0.16 does not do this optimization yet.
+
+### Usage
+The index sorting can be configured setting `sort_by_field` on `IndexSettings` and passing it to a `IndexBuilder`. As of tantvy 0.16 only fast fields are allowed to be used.
+
+```
+let settings = IndexSettings {
+    sort_by_field: Some(IndexSortByField {
+        field: "intval".to_string(),
+        order: Order::Desc,
+    }),
+    ..Default::default()
+};
+let mut index_builder = Index::builder().schema(schema);
+index_builder = index_builder.settings(settings);
+let index = index_builder.create_in_ram().unwrap();
+```
+