Index versus Data Base

Index versus Data Base.

How many of your employees can extract their own reports from DB? What do they do if they cannot? Does using IT create a bottleneck?

How long does it take to extract reports from the DBs, generate the query plus search latency?

Are you finding you have to recreate very similar reports because existing ones are not meeting users needs?

Would it be powerful to give this access to all users with a natural language search?

Unlike, Rather Than:

Without the need for SQL knowledge FAST allows free text ad-hoc querying over structured database data.

Business Objective, Business Challenges:

Empowering all users.

Increased employee productivity.

Would it benefit you if you could?

Not only tech experts than can extract reports.

Get access to information faster.

I can give you an example:

We worked on a project with a Portuguese Bank who had 1.5 TB of scanned copies of cheques spanning 15 years. Database search was prohibitively long taking up to several minutes to respond with results.

Replacing the database solution with FAST ESP we were able to reduce the result response to sub-seconds over the same corpus of data with rates of up to 140 queries per second. This meant they could serve more customers in less time with less resources.

Databases are not conducive to search. When designed they were modelled on the most common form of data storage at the time – the filing cabinet. The databases were the cabinets and the tables the drawers.

The pre-structured nature of databases is optimal if we place data into the drawer the same way we take it out, for example transactions. Let’s say I organise my garments at home by type, which I don’t, socks in one drawer, trousers in one drawer and jumpers in another drawer. This is an optimal method of storage if I am asked to return all my socks or a certain pair of trousers. I know where to go.

However today’s organisations demand intelligence across data. For example, return to me all red garments. If this was a database we would need to open up each drawer and rummage around – what we call a full table scan. Databases are not optimised for this type of searching so it can be extremely time consuming.

Unlike databases, search is modelled on human dialogue. It’s how you would ask an expert for advice and expect the answer to be presented. You don’t want to have a list of links to where you may find the answer dumped in front of you. You want to engage in conversation to narrow candidate results to a manageable handful.