Close
  • Latest News
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Networking
  • Cybersecurity
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Storage
  • Sponsored
  • Mobile
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
Read Down
Sign in
Close
Welcome!Log into your account
Forgot your password?
Read Down
Password recovery
Recover your password
Close
Search
Logo
Logo
  • Latest News
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Big Data and Analytics
  • Cloud
  • Networking
  • Cybersecurity
  • Applications
  • IT Management
  • Storage
  • Sponsored
  • Mobile
  • Small Business
  • Development
  • Database
  • Servers
  • Android
  • Apple
  • Innovation
  • Blogs
  • PC Hardware
  • Reviews
  • Search Engines
  • Virtualization
More
    Home Applications
    • Applications

    Microsoft Debuts Azure Basic Search Tier

    By
    Pedro Hernandez
    -
    March 3, 2016
    Share
    Facebook
    Twitter
    Linkedin
      Azure Search

      eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

      Microsoft has added a Basic tier to Azure Search, bringing the total number of available plans to four. Launched nearly a year ago and influenced by the software giant’s Bing public search engine, the “search-as-a-service” offering enables Web and mobile developers to build custom, natural-language search experiences for their applications.

      Costing $75 per month—half off during the preview period—a Basic Azure Search plan can index up to 1 million documents. For comparison’s sake, the Free plan tops out at 10,000 documents and 50 megabytes of storage, while Standard S1 subscriptions (approximately $250 per month) top out at 180 million documents and 300GB of storage. A Standard S2 plan is also available, offering even more capacity.

      The new Basic tier is Microsoft’s response to customer demand for a more modest alternative to the Standard plans, said Liam Cavanagh, principal program manager of Microsoft Azure Search, in a March 2 announcement. “Basic is great for cases where you need the production-class characteristics of Standard but have lower capacity requirements,” he stated.

      Those production-class capabilities include dedicated partitions and service workloads (replicas), along with resource isolation and service-level agreement (SLA) guarantees, which are not offered in the Free tier. Hence, Microsoft discourages the use of Free plans for workloads meant to power Web and mobile app search experiences in production.

      In terms of performance, Microsoft was able to index roughly 15,000 documents per minute when organized into batches of 1,000 documents each, revealed Cavanagh. Queries will slow down if pushed to those extremes, he cautioned, but customers should be able to index a million documents in just over an hour. In its tests, Microsoft used documents of around 1KB in size and a nine-field index with a mix of facetable (used in Azure Search’s faceted navigation feature), filterable and searchable fields, he noted.

      Cavanagh’s group was able to complete five queries per second with latencies of approximately 200 milliseconds for searches that returned hundreds of documents. Searches that generate tens of thousands of results will experience a drop in query-per-second performance and latencies that hover around the 300- to 400-millisecond range. To maintain brisk performance with a Basic Azure Search plan, Cavanagh recommends reusing HTTP clients to avoid extra latency caused by re-establishing connections and avoiding queries that result in a large number of document matches.

      Targeting a greater diversity of workloads and clinging tight to its cloud-first approach to enterprise software and services, Microsoft has steadily been expanding its cloud’s search capabilities.

      Last month, the company turned its attention to unstructured data with a beta version of its search indexer for Azure Blob Storage. The indexer can extract text and metadata from Office file formats (DOCX/DOC, XLSX/XLS, PPTX/PPT and MSG) along with EML, HTML, XML, ZIP and plain text files.

      Pedro Hernandez
      Pedro Hernandez is a contributor to eWEEK and the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Previously, he served as a managing editor for the Internet.com network of IT-related websites and as the Green IT curator for GigaOM Pro.
      Get the Free Newsletter!
      Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis
      This email address is invalid.
      Get the Free Newsletter!
      Subscribe to Daily Tech Insider for top news, trends & analysis
      This email address is invalid.

      MOST POPULAR ARTICLES

      Latest News

      Zeus Kerravala on Networking: Multicloud, 5G, and...

      James Maguire - December 16, 2022 0
      I spoke with Zeus Kerravala, industry analyst at ZK Research, about the rapid changes in enterprise networking, as tech advances and digital transformation prompt...
      Read more
      Applications

      Datadog President Amit Agarwal on Trends in...

      James Maguire - November 11, 2022 0
      I spoke with Amit Agarwal, President of Datadog, about infrastructure observability, from current trends to key challenges to the future of this rapidly growing...
      Read more
      Cloud

      IGEL CEO Jed Ayres on Edge and...

      James Maguire - June 14, 2022 0
      I spoke with Jed Ayres, CEO of IGEL, about the endpoint sector, and an open source OS for the cloud; we also spoke about...
      Read more
      Applications

      Kyndryl’s Nicolas Sekkaki on Handling AI and...

      James Maguire - November 9, 2022 0
      I spoke with Nicolas Sekkaki, Group Practice Leader for Applications, Data and AI at Kyndryl, about how companies can boost both their AI and...
      Read more
      IT Management

      Intuit’s Nhung Ho on AI for the...

      James Maguire - May 13, 2022 0
      I spoke with Nhung Ho, Vice President of AI at Intuit, about adoption of AI in the small and medium-sized business market, and how...
      Read more
      Logo

      eWeek has the latest technology news and analysis, buying guides, and product reviews for IT professionals and technology buyers. The site’s focus is on innovative solutions and covering in-depth technical content. eWeek stays on the cutting edge of technology news and IT trends through interviews and expert analysis. Gain insight from top innovators and thought leaders in the fields of IT, business, enterprise software, startups, and more.

      Facebook
      Linkedin
      RSS
      Twitter
      Youtube

      Advertisers

      Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on eWeek and our other IT-focused platforms.

      Advertise with Us

      Menu

      • About eWeek
      • Subscribe to our Newsletter
      • Latest News

      Our Brands

      • Privacy Policy
      • Terms
      • About
      • Contact
      • Advertise
      • Sitemap
      • California – Do Not Sell My Information

      Property of TechnologyAdvice.
      © 2022 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved

      Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.

      ×