Full inverted index

A full inverted index is a database index which maps keys to locations. An inverted index maps keys to locations which are file specifiers, while a full inverted index is a multimap from keys to location pairs

<file, offset>.

Inverted indices are often used to select documents in a search for terms, in which case the keys are typically words or other segmentation units of the document. Full inverted indices accelerate the process of locating an instance of the key by eliminating the need to scan the text, but trade off this speed for the requirement of twice the space of a simple inverted index (assuming that offset and file specifiers are of equal length).