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Showing posts from October, 2014

Paralysis by Analysis

A lot of times we run into Paralysis by Analysis . We use Lucene for indexing cloud storage data and its a very old home grown system, we are soon going to retire it and replace it with Elastic Search.  Recently we ran into Paralysis by Analysis situation where we were waiting for Elastic Search project to go live to implement Folder Search and we were debating over it for months while customers were cribbing for it. The move to Elastic Search requires migration of billions of files and PetaBytes of contents to be migrated which can take months. Finally I got approval that instead of waiting for ElasticSearch lets do a simple canonical prefix based search out of database directly. It took 2 days to implement server api and 1 week for UI,plumbing work and QA.  As we use Mysql Sharding, the solution scaled fine, all I needed to ensure was proper indexes were there. Two days I got email from Support that customers are in love with Folder search :). Offcourse this is not perfect solutio