#community-help

Updating Schemas and Managing Collections in Typesense

TLDR Davide asked about updating schemas without reloading data, Jason recommended using aliases to point to timestamped collections and dropping old collections after an update.

31mo

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May 19, 2021 (31 months ago)

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Davide

01:15 AM

Is there an easy way to update a schema without reloading all data (eg: changing a field to a facet)?

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Jason

01:23 AM

Not at the moment unfortunately, but updating a collection's schema is on our roadmap.

In the meantime, I'd recommend using aliases (similar to symlinks in linux) to point to a timestamped collection and using that alias for searches. When you need to update the schema, you'd create a new collection with the latest timestamp in its name, index the data, and then finally switch the alias to point to the new collection.

01:23

Jason

01:23 AM

More info here: https://typesense.org/docs/0.20.0/api/collection-alias.html

Davide

01:25 AM

ah, cool! Only question is what happens once I have 100k indexes? Can I purge them?

Jason

01:25 AM

Once you update the collection alias to the latest one, you'd finally want to drop the old collection

Davide

01:26 AM

Gotcha, this is fantastic, thanks

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