Hi, I have a question regarding fields with with low cardinality. (fields like transaction_status). Needed to ask if we should be keeping those as integers in pinot and maintain enums on application end. or Can we keep the field values as string in pinot and pinot's forward index already optimizes for low cardinality string fields. Will the lookup and aggregation performance for string values be nearly same as with integer?

Pinot will optimize it by creating a dictionary

These queries: select count(1), status from trips group by status select * from trips where status = 'Early'

Yes, the performance should be fairly close (int is slightly faster) if you use dictionary encoding and add inverted index to the column