While Elasticsearch can be an attractive solution for search/filtering/sorting needs, we found the maintenance costs outweighed the benefits. That’s why we opted for a Postgres solution. In this talk, I will outline our situation and business requirements, briefly explore our decision-making process and elaborate on how we determined a Postgres solution would adequately serve our needs without creating unnecessary costs. This presentation was given during the the Spaces Summit, an internal IT conference by and for the engineers of bol.com.

1. Making Postgres Great Again: Why We Ditched Elasticsearch in
Favor of a Postgres Solution
Colette Biervliet-Schranz
Team POW
1

2. 2
Is Postgres good enough?
???
IDK

3. ❖ Our use case
❖ Postgres Research and Results
❖ Looking ahead
3
Agenda

4. 4
SDD Orders Screen

5. 5
SDD and WHOA

6. 6
Current Search on Orders
Things you can search for:
467144359
790356082
734724846
890267385
153858964
857894655
105735956
937485025
183649573
265037950
729473560
385620718
275936590
274650374
104836395
690376403
306429853
844377449
The possibilities are endless!

7. 7
Search Results Example

8. 8
The Goal
WOW!
GREAT FILTERS
AMAZING
SEARCH
COOL!
SORTING

9. 9
Search Options

10. 10
Filtering Options

11. 11
Sorting Options

12. ❖ “Small” seller has 10 orders/year
❖ “Medium” seller has 500 orders/year
❖ “Large” seller has 10,000 orders/year
12
Who is searching?

13. 13
To elasticsearch or not to elasticsearch...

14. ❖ Our use case
❖ Postgres Research and Results
❖ Looking ahead
14
Agenda

15. 15
Test Data Set
❖ 50 Million orders in total
❖ 50k open orders
❖ 5 million (10%) LvB
❖ 45 million (90%) LvR
❖ 2000 sellers
❖ 10,000 products
❖ Each seller had about 25,000 orders
❖ REMEMBER: “average” seller has ~1,000/year

16. 16
Keeping It Simple

17. 17
REMEMBER
❖ 13 requests/second
❖ 26 requests/second

18. 18
Results
If you’re reading this, you’ve got very good eyes! Congrats!

19. 19
Results for Real 1

20. 20
Results for Real 2

21. 21
Is Postgres good enough?

22. 22
Is Postgres good enough?
With an average response time of
141 ms, YES!

23. ❖ Our use case
❖ Postgres Research and Results
❖ Looking ahead
23
Agenda

24. 24
Future of WHOA

25. Special Thanks
To my supportive teammates !!!
25
Yay
Leon
Andrey
Eduardo

26. Thanks!
Til next time bol.com