Got it! One more question if I may: in https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26356, all the JOB queries are around a second or less, if I read correctly.

My understanding is the query:

movie

    .with(keyword.eq("my-kw"))

    .select(title)

is inlined to something by the compiler approximately like

for movie in 0..movie_count {

    let lo = keyword_offsets[movie];

    let hi = keyword_offsets[movie + 1];

    for pos in lo..hi {

        let kw = keyword_ids[pos];

        if keyword_text[kw] == "my-kw" {

            emit(movie, movie_title[movie]);

            break;

        }

    }

}

So there's no index lookup on keyword, right? E.g., to use a hash index on keyword to find the resulting movie rows. If I wanted to do so, would I re-normalize the data in some way? This is what surprised me: that even without the secondary indexes, it is still the same (or more) performant than DuckDB.

Perhaps the index-lookup version would use something like

let movies_by_keyword: HashIdx<_, _> =

      keyword.text().inv().collect();

but it does not seem like it does (even though I assume DuckDB may).