Mailing List Archive

Detailed description of query processing functionality
Hi all,

I'm trying to understand how Lucene deals with particular query types.
My main case is a query where there is a mixture of Should and Must
clauses, potentially with some MinimumShouldMatch criteria.

Firstly, I understand that Lucene operates as a documented-ordered
index, and hence processes queries in a Document-at-a-Time manner. My
question is how does Lucene manage these types of query under the hood?
For example, do we first intersect the Must lists and build a bit-vector
which is then used to jump to the matching documents, which can then be
scored and returned? Or do we simply do this on-the-fly as a single pass
traversal? Perhaps a combination of both?

Any information would be greatly appreciated, and of course, any
examples or relevant code/snippets are a bonus.

Joel