Solr date field tdate vs date?

Question

So I have a question about Solr\'s field date types which is pretty straight forward: what\'s the difference between a \'date\' field and a \'tdate\' one?

The schema .xm

Answer 1

Your best bet is to just look at the source code. Some of the things for Solr aren't well documented and the fastest way to get a trustworthy answer is to simply look at the code. If you haven't been in the code yet, that too is to your benefit. At least in the long run.

Here's a link to the TrieTokenizerFactory.

http://www.jarvana.com/jarvana/view/org/apache/solr/solr-core/1.4.1/solr-core-1.4.1-sources.jar!/org/apache/solr/analysis/TrieTokenizerFactory.java?format=ok

The javadoc in the class at least hints at the purpose of the precisionStep. You could dig futher.

EDIT: I dug a bit further for you. It's passed off directly to Lucene's NumericTokenStream class, which will used the value during parsing the token stream. Probably worth closer examination. It seems to deal with granularity and is probably a tradeoff between size in the index and speed.