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ADAM goes Elastic
May 11, 2015
On April 22 and 23, ADAM software, a leader in the Forrester wave of digital asset management, held its yearly event called “ADAM Sync” in Europe. The ideal occasion to be immersed in company insights and future roadmaps, and in creative ideas presented by the different speakers.
This is part 2 discussing the technical track of the ADAM Sync event.
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As the title of the post suggests: ADAM goes for Elastic. This means the platform will have a completely redesigned search engine, no longer based upon Microsoft SQL Server, but based upon Elastic (formerly know as Elasticsearch). Elastic is a search server based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Shay Banon released the first version of Elasticsearch in 2010. In 2012 Elasticsearch BV was founded to provide commercial solutions around the product. Since then Elastic has become one of the most significant search engines available on the market, with a better and newer architecture than its counterpart Apache SOLR.
Elastic introduces modern search features such as autocorrection, thesaurus and more Google like features such as “Did you mean…?”. ADAM will now support the “CONTAINS” operator in searches, something that was often asked by customers but couldn’t be handled by SQL Server Full Text engine.
By using Elastic, ADAM can offload the SQL Server resulting in an overall performance gain. Several tests confirmed that the overall search queries take up significantly less time to be executed. Currently only records, files and fields will be driven by Elastic, search on classifications and other system objects will be kept on the SQL Server. The security mechanisms and caches of Elastic will be used. This allows ADAM to “drop” existing security caches that were based upon SQL Server, resulting in another performance boost and lower memory requirements on the ADAM Server itself.
The second important feature being introduced is a REST based API, making all common ADAM functionality available by means of platform independent HTTP calls. This API will become the first in line to use. The .NET API will continue to exist, but will serve for tasks REST is less suited for. An example of this are bulk record operations.
We can expect both features to become available this year in ADAM 5.x versions of the product.
Some indications and hints were given on the new major version: ADAM 6. The new version needs to become a more unified platform where studios will be merged into one application, serving different roles of users by means of the same UI. It results in a more unified “Smart Content Hub” experience.
If you are (also) interested in the main summary of the Sync event, than you should also read part 1: Welcome, Smart Content Hub!.