Matt Jaffe was on a recent episode of Go Time and also gave this talk at OSCON recently on indexes as a first class citizen. In this video Matt talks about a piece of software that’s purely an index, not a database, not a datastore, just the index — and optimizing that single piece of software to be very fast!

Here’s a quick breakdown of an index as a first class citizen:

• Standalone application, not just a data structure
• Horizontally scalable, distributed
• FAST, indexes should make things faster
• Flexible, integrates with other datastores and data types

Also, learn more about Pilosa to see Matt’s work in action.