With Lucene: Why do I get a Too Many Clauses error if I do a prefix search?

Question

I\'ve had an app doing prefix searches for a while. Recently the index size was increased and it turned out that some prefixes were too darned numerous for lucene to handle.

Answer 1

I've hit this before. It has to do with the fact that lucene, under the covers, turns many (all?) things into boolean queries when you call Query.rewrite()

From: http://web.archive.org/web/20110915061619/http://lucene.apache.org:80/java/2_2_0/api/org/apache/lucene/search/Query.html

public Query rewrite(IndexReader reader)
              throws IOException

    Expert: called to re-write queries into primitive queries.
            For example, a PrefixQuery will be rewritten into a
            BooleanQuery that consists of TermQuerys.

    Throws:
        IOException