Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am aware index format is identical in either case.
One benefit of allowing one to specify a field as single-valued is similar to specifying that a field is required: Providing a safeguard that index data conforms to requirements. So making all fields multivalued forgoes that integrity check for fields which by definition should be singular. Also depending on the response writer and for the XMLResponseWriter the requested response version (see http://wiki.apache.org/solr/XMLResponseFormat) the multi-valued setting can determine whether the document values returned from a query will be scalars (eg. <str name="year">2010</str>) or arrays of scalars (<arr name="year"><str>2010</str></arr>), regardless of how many values are actually stored. But the most significant gotcha of not specifying the actual arity (1 or N) arises if any of those fields is used for field-faceting: By default the field-faceting logic chooses a different algorithm depending on whether the field is multi-valued, and the default choice for multi-valued is only appropriate for a small set of enumerated values since it creates a filter query for each value in the set. And this can have a profound effect on Solr memory utilization. So if you are not relying on the field arity setting to select the algorithm, you or your users might need to specify it explicitly with the f.<field>.facet.method argument; see http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrFacetingOverview for more info. So while all-multivalued isn't a showstopper, if it were up to me I'd want to give users the option to specify arity and whether the field is required. - J.J. At 2:13 PM +0100 12/21/10, Tim Terlegård wrote: >In our application we use dynamic fields and there can be about 50 of >them and there can be up to 100 million documents. > >Are there any disadvantages having multivalued=true on all fields in >the schema? An admin of the application can specify dynamic fields and >if they should be indexed or stored. Question is if we gain anything >by letting them to choose multivalued as well or if it just adds >complexity to the user interface? > >Thanks, >Tim
