zindex

Dev tools

command line search tool

SHOW HN2015

125points
35comments
#185of 2,565 in 2015
Top 8%of 2015 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

1 positive, 6 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 0 critical, out of 7 comments about the project. Thread score +0.11.

Idea: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful idea for searching compressed logs; practical checkpoint approach

    From 2 comments
    • The article's method is nice, it allows you to decompress portions of the file. I thought this would be about the FM index. The FM index allows you to search what is essentially…
      jules on HN
    • I have been wanting this for a long time, although my primary use case would be indexing a particular field. It is nice that you were able to make it work with ordinary gzip…
      xaa on HN

Objections

  • Indexing speed on large files is slow because it must scan sequentially

    From 2 comments
    • About how long does it take to create the index, maybe compared to a zgrep? Could it be parallelized with something like `parallel --pipe`? I haven't tried yet, but this seems…
      nattaylor on HN
    • Thanks! For my logfiles it runs through them at around 3MB/sec (that's 3MB of compressed file per second). Most of it is probably I/O, my giant logs are on NFS. I run the indexer…
      mattgodbolt on HN

Requests

  • Support indexing by column name or field in delimited files

    From 2 comments
    • Smart. I will see for myself in a minute how much space such an approach takes; I would imagine the compressor size gets nontrivially large on big files. Well, my exact use case,…
      xaa on HN
    • As of just now, zindex and zq now support field-based indexing. Hope this helps your use case!
      mattgodbolt on HN
  • Fuzzy matching such as wildcard search for MAC addresses

    From 2 comments
    • I only wish that the matching could be 'fuzzy' in easily defined ways. My use case is MAC addresses. So, if I search for 'dead.beef.cafe', this would be perfect if it could know…
      hackmiester on HN
    • Great idea. zq uses the SQLite index built by zindex; so in theory I can modify it to use a 'WHERE index LIKE xxx' instead of 'WHERE index=xxx' -- then SQLish wildcards would be…
      mattgodbolt on HN

Questions

  • How the tool finds the right block and offset in arbitrary-size gzip blocks

    From 2 comments
    • I have been wanting this for a long time, although my primary use case would be indexing a particular field. It is nice that you were able to make it work with ordinary gzip…
      xaa on HN
    • Fantastic! I had hoped others would have the same problem as me. I didn't have the luxury of being able to change my many input gzip files (unlike BGZF). The trick is to store…
      mattgodbolt on HN
  • Whether multiple indexes can exist on one gzip file

    From 2 comments
    • Smart. I will see for myself in a minute how much space such an approach takes; I would imagine the compressor size gets nontrivially large on big files. Well, my exact use case,…
      xaa on HN
    • Short reply as I'm on a phone, but thanks! I can add an option to pick the nth field, and to skip the first X lines of the input; I think this'd cover your use case! The code and…
      mattgodbolt on HN

Alternatives named

  • FM-index and succinct data structures

    From 2 comments
    • Why not store the log files in an FM-index? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-index)
      dpkendal on HN
    • See "succinct data structures" and "wavelet trees" for a similar / more general idea. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7079427 I also must thank Edward Kmett for introducing me to…
      dangirsh on HN
  • BGZF blocked gzip format

    From 1 comment
    • I have been wanting this for a long time, although my primary use case would be indexing a particular field. It is nice that you were able to make it work with ordinary gzip…
      xaa on HN
  • dictzip

    From 1 comment
    • Reminds me of dictzip. http://sourceforge.net/projects/dict/files/latest/download
      101914 on HN
  • Strigi and JStream

    From 1 comment
    • Strigi desktop search (2006) implementation was very powerful (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigi). It was possible to search through an compressed archive inside an compressed…
      frik on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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