Using full norms (Was: Bubbling up newer records)

[Jiří Kuhn <ji...@clapix.com>]

Hello,

>
> Michael McCandless wrote:
>
> The upcoming Lucene in Action revision (now available online through
Manning's MEAP) has a basic example of this (boosting by recency) in the
Advanced Search chapter, using function queries.
>

I have never used function queries before, but it was very easy to boost
more recent documents with help of FieldScoreQuery. This may be quite common
usage. The result is based on computation during search time but the same
result would be accomplished using document boost during indexing time (and
certainly faster with less memory used). But there is a difference -
document boost is used to compute document's norm value which is stored with
precision loss (float encoded as byte).

The question: Is still really an issue to encode norms as bytes? Do we lose
less than we gain?

Can someone imagine any real disadvantages of storing norms as full 4-bytes
float? Nowadays?

Best regards,
Jiri Kuhn.