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I am looking for any option like dynamic fields (Solr) in Vespa. I need to add new fields to the existing schema without redeployment of the whole application.

Anything related to this is mentioned in documentation of Vespa http://docs.vespa.ai/documentation/search-definitions.html#modify-search-definitions

where it is mentioned that we can add a new field and run vespa-deploy prepare and vespa-deploy activate. But isn't it resubmission of whole application? What is an option to implement it at least overhead?

vandit.thakkar
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2 Answers2

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http://docs.vespa.ai/documentation/search-definitions.html#modify-search-definitions is the right document, yes

altering the search definition is safe, as the deploy prepare step will output steps needed (e.g. no steps, re-start or re-feed). Most actions do not require re-start or re-feed, as Vespa is built to be production friendly, and adding fields is easy as it requires no actions.

Note that there is no support for default values for fields.

As the Vespa configuration is declarative, the full application package is submitted, but the config servers will calculate changes and deploy the delta to the nodes. This makes it easy to keep the application package config in a code repo like git - what you see in the repo is what is deployed.

Kristian Aune
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It depends on what you mean by "dynamic".

If the fields number in the hundreds, are controlled by the application owners and changed daily, then changing the schema and redeploy works perfectly fine: Fields can be updated individually (even when indexed), they incur no overhead if not used, and deploying an application with new fields is cheap and do not require any restarts or anything like that.

If you need tens of thousands of fields, or the fields are added and removed by users, then Vespa does not have a solution for you out of the box. You'd need to mangle the fields into the same index by adding e.g a "myfield_" prefix to each token. This is what engines that support this do internally to make this efficient.

Jon
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