My slides for the session I held at Azure Bootcamp Bulgaria 2016. This presentation will work you through the basics of Azure Search and show you how to build a sample application using ASP.NET Web API and KnockoutJS for databinding.

1. April 16
Introduction to Azure Search
Radoslav Gatev
Software Consultant@Accedia
bg.linkedin.com/in/radoslavgatev

2. Why Search Is Important?

3. Why Search Is Important?

4. Azure Search
A search-as-a-service solution allowing developers
to incorporate great search experiences into
applications without managing infrastructure or
needing to become search experts.

5. Scenarios
If an app offers lots of content your users will be
more effective searching instead of browsing
• Ecommerce
• Social content
• Line-of-business applications

6. Using Azure Search

7. PlaceFinder

8. 1. Provisioning Search Services
Search service is:
• Scope of capacity, billing, authentication
• Managed through the portal or management
API
• May have one or more indexes
• Service name -> API root URL
https://mysvc.search.windows.net

9. 2. Defining indexes
Search index is:
• A searchable collection of documents
• Has a schema
• Has various options, e.g. scoring profiles, CORS
• Index name -> API URL:
https://mysvc.search.windows.net/indexes/myindex

10. Index schema
List of fields and their configuration:
• Data types: string, int, double, datetime, boolean,
geo-point
• Single valued or collections
Each field can be used for:
• Search
• Suggestions
• Filters
• Sorting
• Facets
• Results

11. API: Create an index
POST /indexes/myindex?api-version=2015-02-28-Preview
Host: mysvc.search.windows.net
api-key: [YOUR_ADMIN_KEY]
Content-Type: application/json
{
"fields": [
{"name": "placeId","type": "Edm.String", "key": true},
{"name": "nameBg", "type": "Edm.String"},
{"name": "type", "type": "Edm.String" }
],
"corsOptions": { "allowedOrigins": [ "*" ] }
}

12. 3. Indexing data
• Data is indexed in batches
o Up to 1000 operations: upload, merge, delete or mergeOrUpload
o POST to …/indexes/myindex/docs/index
• A success response ensures durability
o Client needs to check response body for individual operation
status
• Data will be searchable a few seconds later
o The data must be indexed, depends on how busy the system is

13. API: Batch Upload
POST /indexes/myindex/docs/index?api-version=2015-02-28
Host: mysvc.search.windows.net
api-key: [YOUR_ADMIN_KEY]
Content-Type: application/json
{
"value": [
{
"@search.action": "upload",
"placeId": "3620764888",
"nameBg": "Университет по ...",
"placeType": "university",
...
},
...
]
}

14. Indexing approaches
• Push
o .NET SDK
o REST API
• Pull
o Azure SQL Database
o SQL Server hosted in Azure VM
o DocumentDB
o Blob Storage

15. 4. Searching
• Scope for search is an index
• The search API offers a number of options
o Full-text search including user-friendly operators
o Query support: strict filters, sorting, paging and field
selection
o Faceting
o Hit highlighting
• Results include scores plus requested fields

16. API: Search
• Simple search:
…/docs/search=your search query goes there
• Search with a strict filter:
…/docs?search=Sofia&$filter=placeType eq ‘university'
• Search with sorting, paging, field selection:
…/docs?search=Sofia&$orderby=nameBg asc&
$top=5&$select=nameBg
• Faceting:
…/docs?search=Sofia&facet=placeType
• Hit highlighting:
…/docs?search=Sofia&highlight=nameEn

17. Geospatial Search
• Search in documents within X km of my location
• Sort results by distance from my location
• Search for documents within a given polygon

18. Search Suggestions
• Building block for auto-complete
• Tricky balance of speed and features
• Suggestions come from document data

19. 5. Tuning
• Default: scoring based on text relevance
• Scoring profiles for tuning scores
o Field weights: relative importance of fields
o Scoring functions: describe what matters to you
• One or more scoring profiles for different
scenarios

20. PlaceFinder
• Indexed Open Street Map for Sofia
• Used Azure SQL indexer which is powered by a
view
• Used technologies:
o ASP.NET Web API
o Azure Search .NET SDK
o KnockoutJS
• Project repository:
https://github.com/RadoslavGatev/PlaceFinder

21. Scaling
Partitions
(more documents, more storage, parallelism)
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12
Replicas
(morequeries,moreHA)
1-12
R x P <= 36

22. Service tiers
* Minimum two replicas for read-SLA, three replicas for
read-write-SLA
** Can be increased by calling Azure support
Service tier Free Basic(Preview) Standard S1
Availability SLA No Yes* Yes*
Max documents 10,000 1 million 180** million
(15 million/partition)
Max partitions N/A 1 12
Max replicas N/A 3 12
Max storage 50 MB 2 GB 300** GB
(25 GB/partition)

23. A few ideas
• Use cache-aside pattern and Redis Cache
o Reduce monetary costs
o Maintain high availability
• Multi-service scaling
o Use load balancing
o Prevent whole-region failures
o Handle extreme search workloads

25. Upcoming events
SQLSaturday #519 in may!
http://www.sqlsaturday.com/519/

26. Thanks to our Sponsors:
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