How to get all the records matching a regex in Aerospike?

Question

I have millions of records in a set. I would like to retrieve all the records that match the same pattern.

For example I may have :

id=4444?mode=mode1?fieldA=abc
id=4444?mode=mode1?fieldA=azerty
id=4444?mode=mode1?fieldA=qwerty
id=4444?mode=mode1?fieldA=foo
id=4444?mode=mode1?fieldA=bar

Is it possible to make a query to get all the above records without knowing in advance the value of the fieldA ? Something like this in regex :

    id=4444?mode=mode1?fieldA=[\w]*

Thanks for you time.

Answer 1

Yes, it can be done. You would need to query by a secondary index first to narrow the result set to a manageable size first, then write a filter using Lua which filters out the ones you don't want. This filter could take the regex you want to match against (passed in dynamically) and return only those records that match.

Whilst this would work, it would not be as performant as the key-value operations in Aerospike. You would definitely want to benchmark such a solution before putting it into production.