25. Distributed Search Index
Search is currently implemented with blevesearch, which internally uses bbolt. bbolt writes to a local file, which prevents scaling out the service.
The initial implementation used a single blevesearch index for all spaces. While this makes querying all spaces easy because the results do not need to be aggregated from multiple indexes, the single node becomes a bottleneck when answering search queries. Furthermore, indexing is also part of the search service and has to share the resources.
- Indexing should be decoupled from the search service
- The search service should be able to scale horizontally
- The solution needs to be embeddable in the single binary
- one index per space
- elasticsearch (java)
- dgraph (go)
- manticore (C++)
- meilisearch (Rust)
Chosen option: ???
- TODO
- TODO
Instead of using a single index (current implementation) or a distributed search index like elasticsearch the search service should aggregate queries from dedicated indexes per space. The api to a space index provider should be able to take multiple space ids in the request, similar to how a storage provider can handle multiple spaces. When treating spaces and the corresponding search index to belong together we can also treat them as a single unit for backup and restore. In federated deployments we can send the search queries to all search providers / spaces that the user has access to.
How a search provider is implemented then depends on the requirements. For a single node deployment bleve might be fine, for a kubernetes deployment a dedicated service might be the better fit.
- Good, commercial support available at https://www.elastic.co/de/pricing
- Good, industry standard
- Bad, nobody seems to like it
- Bad, not embeddable (Java)
- Good, commercial support available at https://dgraph.io/pricing
- Good, embeddable? (go) - TODO verify
- Good, commercial support available at https://manticoresearch.com/services/
- Bad, not embeddable (C++)
- Good, commercial support available at https://www.meilisearch.com/pricing
- Bad, not embeddable (Rust)
- supersedes ADR-0019 File Search Index