Old Dogs Are Great at New Tricks: Column Stores for IR Prototyping

We make the suggestion that instead of implementing cus-tom index structures and query evaluation algorithms, IR researchers should simply store document representations in a column-oriented relational database and implement ranking models using SQL. For rapid prototyping, this is particu-larly advantageous since researchers can explore new scoring functions and features by simply issuing SQL queries, with-out needing to write imperative code. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by an implementation of conjunc-tive BM25 using two modern column stores. Experiments on a web collection show that a retrieval engine built in this manner achieves effectiveness and efficiency on par with custom-built retrieval engines, but provides many additional advantages, including cleaner query semantics, a simpler ar-chitecture, built-in support for error analysis, and the ability to exploit advances in database technology “for free”