In In business applications, it is impossible to fully index databases in the system due to the high cost of maintenance. On the other hand, from the observation of search engines, users' queries are highly skewed. As a result, in BestPeer system we use a special index technique, just-in-time indexing. The system only builds the index for the data that are frequently queried. In other words, the index in the network is adaptively tuned based on the query distribution, data distribution, update rates and other factors.

Just-in-time (JIT) is an inventory strategy implemented to improve the return on investment of a business by reducing in-process inventory and its associated carrying costs. We use this term to emphasize that indexes in BestPeer system are built selectively to reduce the maintenance cost.