Search in DSE 6 with Nick Panahi

Nick Panahi shares what’s new and awesome with Search in DSE 6, including what you can do with search-enabled CQL queries, the performance enhancements you can expect to see, and why configuring search just got easier.

Also, read the blog post "What's new for search in DataStax 6"!

0:15 - Jeff welcomes Product Manager Nick Panahi back to the show

1:36 - What is new with Search in DSE 6: integration with Advanced Performance and API improvements

2:38 - Search enabled CQL: we know incorporating SOLR syntax in CQL queries is awkward. We’re incorporating more and more SQL-style syntax into CQL

4:00 - The query analyzer is intercepting queries to leverage search indexes to enable queries that wouldn’t be supported with regular Cassandra, such as search queries on non-primary key columns

5:58 - You can use tracing to identify and analyze where search indexes are being used

6:40 - The LIKE keyword was introduced into CQL with the SASI index feature, this is now being used in DSE search. Other keywords like IS NOT NULL, CONTAINS, IN are included as well

8:00 - Behind the scenes, DSE Search makes use of the DSE 6 advanced performance features. The previous indexing pipeline was asynchronous, taking around 10s for writes to be visible in the index.

11:25 - The write pipeline has been flattened in DSE 6 so we are much more synchronous. This eliminates a lot of configuration options like backpressure.

12:53 - This real-time indexing demonstrates higher throughput and is more efficient due to use of a global RAM buffer shared across all indexes

15:00 - Performance metrics: write latencies are a bit longer, but the overall throughput is much higher. Also stability is higher, with fewer dropped mutations.

16:40 - Search-enabled CQL is the first step in a longer process of query optimization: geospatial query, relevance scores, prepared statements, etc.

18:25 - On the importance of geospatial queries for better user experience in location-aware services

20:05 - Along with Advanced Performance, Search-enabled CQL seems to be the DSE 6 feature that customers are most excited about

21:46 - Future work includes automatic indexing of Cassandra tables