search

Google revolution is spreading. Prior to search, hierarchical directories (like Yahoo) were the dominant
way to organize and find information on the web. As the amount of information increased, the directory paradigm run into problems handling the scale, and Google's search paradigm with it's simplicity has become ubiquitous way to find information. Users are at ease with search, as a result, search paradigm has been spreading.

Search had already come to desktop. Google Desktop brought powerful search engine into the desktop. And with Windows 7, Microsoft went beyond search as an application and put search at the core of the user experience. Just as search has displaced the directories on the web and become the primary mechanism to find information, it has become the primary mechanism in Windows 7 for most things from starting applications to finding files, displacing Windows Explorer.  read more »

We've used number of different technologies to provide persistence service in our products. Our main concerns/requirements can be listed as:

1. performance. The persistence mechanism should perform well since we manage real time monitoring data. Number of write/read operations per second as well as performance of the queries are key performance aspects for us.
2. A fixed/static schema is not suitable for our products since they support dynamic modeling. Mapping from Object to its storage should be flexible.
3. Querying the object storage should be easy and should not require developer skills.

In the first iteration of our products, we had used a database. However, relational databases have a rigid schema structure, hence modification of the schema by the users was problematic. The performance of the solution was also not ideal. Both read/write and search performance were not adequate for many use cases that we have.  read more »