title: What are the limitations of boolean query in Lucene?
body: <p>I have a requirement to find items in a Lucene index that have two basic criterion:
  1. match a specific string called a 'relation'
  2. fall within a list of entitlement 'grant groups' </p>
  
  <p>An entitlement group defines a subset of items accessible by a member of that group and is  much like an authorization role.</p>
  
  <p>All documents in the Lucene index have the 'relation' field and, for simplicity sake, one or more 'grant-group' fields.</p>
  
  <p>So, for example, a user may search for 'foobar' and that user may be a member of groups a, b, c.   foobar, let's say, has grant groups a,p,q,s</p>
  
  <p>The query will be, basically, "match 'foobar' AND (a OR b OR c).</p>
  
  <p>This should work according to Lucene documentation.   </p>
  
  <p>My question is this:  How far can you go with the 2nd part of the boolean query, namely, the part after 'AND' ?  The reason for asking is this: I am about to do a small feasibility study and part of the requirements is the need to support potentially MANY groups in the 'OR' clause.  Possibly up to 200 or 300 groups.</p>
  
  <p>Would there be noticeable performance degradation ?</p>
  
  <p>thanks.</p>