Elasticsearch London user group – The Guardian & Orchestrate test the limits

Last week I popped into the Elasticsearch London meetup, hosted this time by The Guardian newspaper. Interestingly, the overall theme of this event was not just what the (very capable and flexible) Elasticsearch software is capable of, but also how things can go wrong and what to do about it. Jenny Sivapalan and Continue reading

London Enterprise Search Meetup – Databases vs. Search and Taxonomies

Back to London for the next Enterprise Search Meetup, this time featuring Stefan Olafsson of TwigKit and Jeremy Bentley of Smartlogic. Stefan started off with a brief look at relational databases and search engines, and whether the latter can ever supersede the former. He talked about how modern search tech...Continue reading

Replacing relational databases with search engines for simple lookups

One of the things we often notice about existing systems based on relational databases (RDB) is that as they scale to millions of items, simple lookup tasks become slow and inefficient. These tasks don't usually require complicated database operations, so in most cases it is possible to relocate the data from the RDB into a search engine like Flax. Consider a system where a search engine has already been implemented to search textual product information, but numerical data on each product, such...Continue reading