By: Marlene Laus - Marketing Specialist
No matter what size your business is or industry you’re engaged in, the necessity to efficiently locate content on demand is paramount. To locate an item, one must search, and to search there must be a pool of data that can be queried – an index. The act of indexing creates searchable information that users can query to locate their target. Unfortunately, as businesses grow and content volumes rise, it becomes increasingly difficult for some search systems to keep up with the demands of indexing and querying, let alone return quality results.
This is where Elasticsearch comes in. Elasticsearch changes the way your documents are both indexed and queried, making it more efficient and faster than ever to locate your content. TEAM IM has taken this technology to the next level by integrating it with Oracle WebCenter Content, an industry-leading Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. By integrating Elasticsearch with WebCenter Content, you are able to get the latest, fastest and most advanced functionality.
Traditionally, when data is entered into WebCenter Content it goes through Oracle Text Search (OTS) which indexes the data so that your document can be searched by any words within the document and on metadata applied to the document. Elasticsearch takes it even further by providing a data indexing system that is able to index your documents in real time at a remarkably fast speed, resulting in almost instant search results. Operating at an unmatched speed, the advanced indexing system is able to support big repositories with high volumes of search.
One of the most impressive features of Elasticsearch is its ability to be easily scaled both horizontally and vertically. Expand vertically by adding more memory and processors on individual servers and the service will attempt to utilize everything you give it. Expand horizontally when you add additional servers to create clusters and they’ll operate in tandem to power your search efforts.
As repositories continue to grow, it can become difficult for typical indexing systems to keep up with the high demand. Indexes start to break down and it can take days or even weeks to re-build them, possibly rendering your search capabilities inactive. This is where Elasticsearch changes the game for organizations with large repositories; in what would normally take hours, Elasticsearch can efficiently re-build your indexes within minutes.
Elasticsearch enables you get the most out of your search indexes by allowing you to customize them! At a basic level, you have the ability to choose what metadata fields you want to use for searching your documents and the option of using friendly metadata names of your choosing. For example, if you want to find a document that contains the word “Marketing” in the title, you can type “title: Marketing” into the search bar and Elasticsearch will pull all of the documents in your repository with “Marketing” included in the title metadata field. At a more complex level, the Elasticsearch index allows dozens of intricate index configuration options, all of which are available to use with the integration. The different ways you choose to index and search for documents within your repository are limitless. Elasticsearch puts the power in hands of the user.
Finally, Elasticsearch enables you to utilize a practice called “stemming”. For example, if you query for the word “run,” Elasticsearch will compile your results and include documents that contain words where “run” is a stem, such as “runner” and “running”. The non-exact results will be returned with lower confidence than the exact matches but you can rest easy knowing your results will be as complete as possible.
In a nutshell, Elasticsearch enables faster indexing and quicker, more accurate search results while making it easier than ever to utilize customized indexes all while staying fault- and load-tolerant. The possibilities are endless with Elasticsearch supercharging the search capabilities of your WebCenter Content repository.
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