Hi Steven,
Steven Bakker writes :
At the last RIPE meeting there was some discussion about which attributes would be useful to keep indices on. Well, since our office move last weekend, I came up with a (rather predictable) one:
$ whois -i ad "Lockton House"
% ignored attribute "address" since it is not indexed as a reference
% no attributes specified for -i query
$ _
It would be nice to have an index on address, although such an index might become veeerrrry large, due to the fact that you can specify multiple "address" attributes per object; dunno.
Any thoughts?
From the technical point of view:
This is very well possible. Indexing the person objects takes about 1.5 hour. This extra indexing might cause 3 times more indexed values (for person objects only) and thus will probably take about 4.5 hours at this point in time (yes, indexing times are *not* scaling exponentially anymore since the last release ;-)). This means that it could be done on the current machine for the next year and even for a longer term if indexing is done in the weekend. A on-the-fly reindexing feature could solve this problem completely. Note that much of this is harddisk speed bounded and is thus more difficult to speed up then just buying a faster CPU. One warning though, the perl/dbm package might give problems earlier in time, which could make it necessary to withdraw this functionality later in the future. David K. ---