Index Merging by Surajit Chaudhuri and Vivek Narasayya caught my eye for obvious reasons!
I must admit to some disappointment when I found it was collecting index columns and placing them together in a single table. I am sure that technique is quite valuable for data warehouses but isn’t what I think of when I use the phrase, “merging indexes.”
The article is well written and was worth reading. As I started to put it to one side, it occurred to me that perhaps I was too hasty in deciding it wasn’t relevant to topic maps.
What if I had a data warehouse with a “merged” index where collectively the columns supported queries based on subject identity? Or if I wanted to use a set of indexes from other applications (say Lucene for example), to query against for similar purposes?
Whether you are into .Net or not, you should add this one to your reading list.