Non obvious optimization with divide and conquer (opens in new tab)

Deep in the heart of Corax (RavenDB’s querying engine), everything deals with something called a Posting List. Posting Lists are a way for the engine to say “all of those documents have the term Fast for the field Speed”. Conceptually, a Posting List is an ordered set of document ids. In this case (and this is important, the ids in question are numeric, not RavenDB’s document id, which is a string).An interesting problem with Posting Lists is that a term can be unique (such as a GUID) - only ...