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Understanding Typesense Data Sorting Behavior

TLDR Imtiaz had a query about data sorting order in Typesense. Kishore Nallan clarified that data with the same text match score are sorted based on their internal sequential ID, descending.

24mo

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Jan 20, 2022 (24 months ago)

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Imtiaz

10:46 AM

Hi. I have a question regarding sorting. I have referenced https://typesense.org/docs/guide/ranking-and-relevance.html#text-match-score but would like to clarify some behaviour I observe.

A subset of my data appears as follows (NB - when seeding these are added to the index in the order listed below):

icd10,description
E78.1,Pure hyperglyceridaemia
E78.2,Mixed hyperlipidaemia
E78.3,Hyperchylomicronaemia

and my index is as follows:

{
    'name': 'diagnosis',
    'fields': [
        {'name': 'id', 'type': 'string'},  # maps to icd10
        {'name': 'code', 'type': 'string'},  # maps to icd10
        {'name': 'description', 'type': 'string'},  # maps to description
    ]
}

Running a query E78 I get the results in reverse order (E78.3, followed by E78.2 and E78.1)

If I seed the data in reverse order than I get the results in the correct order.

I would just like to understand this behaviour better, and how order of insertion affects sorting (and if its fine to rely on this for my use case since the data wont change).

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Kishore Nallan

10:48 AM

👋 When you query E78 all matching documents have the same text match score, so to break the tie, we sort on their internal document ID, which is an increasing sequential ID.

Imtiaz

10:50 AM

Is this sort by internal sequential ID descending or ascending?

Kishore Nallan

10:50 AM

Descending, you can rely on this behavior.

Imtiaz

10:50 AM

Awesome - thanks!

Kishore Nallan

10:50 AM

Welcome.

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