Chapter 2. Creating Ickle queries

You can limit the number of returned results by using the Query.maxResults(int maxResults). This can be used in conjunction with Query.startOffset(long startOffset) to achieve pagination of the result set.

// sorted by year and match all books that have "clustering" in their title
// and return the third page of 10 results
Query<Book> query = cache.query("FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE title like '%clustering%' ORDER BY year").startOffset(20).maxResults(10)

The QueryResult object includes the .hitCount() method, which returns a hit count value that represents the total number of results from a query, regardless of any pagination parameter.

Additionally, QueryResult object contains a boolean value returned by the .isExact() method which indicates whether the hit count number is exact or a lower bound. The hit count is only available for indexed queries for performance reasons.

The Query object has the .iterator() method to obtain the results lazily. It returns an instance of CloseableIterator that must be closed after usage.

Instead of building a new Query object for every execution it is possible to include named parameters in the query which can be substituted with actual values before execution. This allows a query to be defined once and be efficiently executed many times. Parameters can only be used on the right-hand side of an operator and are defined when the query is created by supplying an object produced by the org.infinispan.query.dsl.Expression.param(String paramName) method to the operator instead of the usual constant value. Once the parameters have been defined they can be set by invoking either Query.setParameter(parameterName, value) or Query.setParameters(parameterMap) as shown in the examples below. ⁠

// Defining a query to search for various authors and publication years
Query<Book> query = cache.query("SELECT title FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE author = :authorName AND publicationYear = :publicationYear").build();

// Set actual parameter values
query.setParameter("authorName", "Doe");
query.setParameter("publicationYear", 2010);

// Execute the query
List<Book> found = query.execute().list();

Alternatively, you can supply a map of actual parameter values to set multiple parameters at once: ⁠

Map<String, Object> parameterMap = new HashMap<>();
parameterMap.put("authorName", "Doe");
parameterMap.put("publicationYear", 2010);

query.setParameters(parameterMap);

The Query API provides two methods for executing Ickle queries on a cache:

Ickle support many filtering operators that can be used for both indexed and non-indexed fields.

Combining multiple attribute conditions with logical conjunction (and) and disjunction (or) operators in order to create more complex conditions is demonstrated in the following example. The well known operator precedence rule for boolean operators applies here, so the order of the operators is irrelevant. Here and operator still has higher priority than or even though or was invoked first.

# match all books that have "Data Grid" in their title
# or have an author named "Manik" and their description contains "clustering"

FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE title LIKE '%Data Grid%' OR author.name = 'Manik' AND description like '%clustering%'

Boolean negation has highest precedence among logical operators and applies only to the next simple attribute condition.

# match all books that do not have "Data Grid" in their title and are authored by "Manik"
FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE title != 'Data Grid' AND author.name = 'Manik'

Changing the precedence of logical operators is achieved with parenthesis:

# match all books that have an author named "Manik" and their title contains
# "Data Grid" or their description contains "clustering"
FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE author.name = 'Manik' AND ( title like '%Data Grid%' OR description like '% clustering%')

In some use cases returning the whole domain object is overkill if only a small subset of the attributes are actually used by the application, especially if the domain entity has embedded entities. The query language allows you to specify a subset of attributes (or attribute paths) to return - the projection. If projections are used then the QueryResult.list() will not return the whole domain entity but will return a List of Object[], each slot in the array corresponding to a projected attribute.

# match all books that have "Data Grid" in their title or description
# and return only their title and publication year
SELECT title, publicationYear FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE title like '%Data Grid%' OR description like '%Data Grid%'

# return the title, publication year and the cache entry version
SELECT b.title, b.publicationYear, version(b) FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book b WHERE b.title like '%Data Grid%'

# return the cache entry value and the cache entry version
SELECT b, version(b) FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book b WHERE b.title like '%Data Grid%'

# return the cache entry value and the the score of the matching
SELECT b, score(b) FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book b WHERE b.title like '%Data Grid%'

# match all books that have "Data Grid" in their title or description
# and return them sorted by the publication year and title
FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE title like '%Data Grid%' ORDER BY publicationYear DESC, title ASC

Data Grid has the ability to group query results according to a set of grouping fields and construct aggregations of the results from each group by applying an aggregation function to the set of values that fall into each group. Grouping and aggregation can only be applied to projection queries (queries with one or more field in the SELECT clause).

The supported aggregations are: avg, sum, count, max, and min.

The set of grouping fields is specified with the GROUP BY clause and the order used for defining grouping fields is not relevant. All fields selected in the projection must either be grouping fields or else they must be aggregated using one of the grouping functions described below. A projection field can be aggregated and used for grouping at the same time. A query that selects only grouping fields but no aggregation fields is legal. ⁠ Example: Grouping Books by author and counting them.

SELECT author, COUNT(title) FROM org.infinispan.sample.Book WHERE title LIKE '%engine%' GROUP BY author

Aggregations

You can apply the following aggregation functions to a field:

Evaluation of queries with grouping and aggregation

Aggregation queries can include filtering conditions, like usual queries. Filtering can be performed in two stages: before and after the grouping operation. All filter conditions defined before invoking the groupBy() method will be applied before the grouping operation is performed, directly to the cache entries (not to the final projection). These filter conditions can reference any fields of the queried entity type, and are meant to restrict the data set that is going to be the input for the grouping stage. All filter conditions defined after invoking the groupBy() method will be applied to the projection that results from the projection and grouping operation. These filter conditions can either reference any of the groupBy() fields or aggregated fields. Referencing aggregated fields that are not specified in the select clause is allowed; however, referencing non-aggregated and non-grouping fields is forbidden. Filtering in this phase will reduce the amount of groups based on their properties. Sorting can also be specified similar to usual queries. The ordering operation is performed after the grouping operation and can reference any of the groupBy() fields or aggregated fields.

You can delete entities from Data Grid caches with the following syntax:

DELETE FROM <entityName> [WHERE condition]

DELETE queries cannot use any of the following:

To execute a fuzzy query add ~ along with an integer, representing the distance from the term used, after the term. For instance

FROM sample_bank_account.Transaction WHERE description : 'cofee'~2

To execute a range query define the given boundaries within a pair of braces, as seen in the following example:

FROM sample_bank_account.Transaction WHERE amount : [20 to 50]

A group of words can be searched by surrounding them in quotation marks, as seen in the following example:

FROM sample_bank_account.Transaction WHERE description : 'bus fare'

To execute a proximity query, finding two terms within a specific distance, add a ~ along with the distance after the phrase. For instance, the following example will find the words canceling and fee provided they are not more than 3 words apart:

FROM sample_bank_account.Transaction WHERE description : 'canceling fee'~3

To search for "text" or "test", use the ? single-character wildcard search:

FROM sample_bank_account.Transaction where description : 'te?t'

To search for "test", "tests", or "tester", use the * multi-character wildcard search:

FROM sample_bank_account.Transaction where description : 'test*'

Regular expression queries can be performed by specifying a pattern between /. Ickle uses Lucene’s regular expression syntax, so to search for the words moat or boat the following could be used:

FROM sample_library.Book  where title : /[mb]oat/

Terms can be boosted by adding a ^ after the term to increase their relevance in a given query, the higher the boost factor the more relevant the term will be. For instance to search for titles containing beer and wine with a higher relevance on beer, by a factor of 3, the following could be used:

FROM sample_library.Book WHERE title : beer^3 OR wine

Both the k-value and the vector can be passed as query parameter. The k-value scalar can be expressed with the usual placeholder :k in the Ickle text. For the vector we can use either a placeholder for each term of the vector:

Query<Item> query = cache.query("from play.Item i where i.floatVector <-> [:a,:b,:c]~:k");
query.setParameter("a", 1);
query.setParameter("b", 4.3);
query.setParameter("c", 3.3);
query.setParameter("k", 4);

Or a placeholder can be used for the entire vector:

Query<Item> query = cache.query("from play.Item i where i.floatVector <-> [:a]~:k");
query.setParameter("a", new float[]{7.1f, 7.0f, 3.1f});
query.setParameter("k", 3);

Is very common also to return the score of the computation, using the score projection. In the case of vector search the query will be like the following:

Query<Object[]> query = cache.query("select i, score(i) from play.Item i where i.floatVector <-> [:a]~:k");
query.setParameter("a", new float[]{7.1f, 7.0f, 3.1f});
query.setParameter("k", 3);

List<Object[]> resultList = query.list();

In this case the first element of each array will contain the entity, and the second element will contain the score of the matching.

Instead of applying the kNN search to the entire population of entities of a given type, you can limiting the searching set applying classic predicates (match, full-text-search, range, …​) to the kNN queries, defining what we call a filtering clause.

A filtering clause can contain any kind of predicates with the only exception of kNN predicates that cannot be included.

For instance the following query:

Query<Object[]> query = remoteCache.query(
   "select score(i), i from Item i where i.floatVector <-> [:a]~:k filtering (i.buggy : 'cat' or i.text : 'code')");
query.setParameter("a", new float[]{7, 7, 7});
query.setParameter("k", 3);

Will return the nearest 3 items from the point [7,7,7] selecting only the items that have a text containing the term cat or code.

The filtering queries is a way to apply the classic indexed search to the new vector search.

It is always required to specify the dimension of the vector field.

The other mapping attributes are optional, since Infinispan will have a default for each of them. You can configure them, for instance, to tune the desired accuracy / performance.