When items are sorted, are all the docs with the sort field missing considered "tied" in terms of their sort order, or are they "indeterminate", or do they have some arbitrary order imposed on them (e.g. _docid_)?
For example, would "b" be considered as part of the sort in the following query, or would all the missing 'a' fields be in some kind of order already, thus making the sort algorithm never check the 'b' field? /select/?q=-a:[* TO *]&sort=a asc,b asc And would sortMissingLast / sortMissingFirst affect the answer to that question? I've been seeing weird behaviour in my index with queries (a little) like this one, but I haven't pinpointed the problem yet. Brad
