Likelihood to Recommend Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.
Read full review Like any NoSQL database, whether it's
MongoDB or not, it's best suited for unstructured data. It's also well suited for storing raw data before processing it and performing any type of ETL on the data.
Read full review Pros Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content. Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity. Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters". Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content. Read full review Scalable Instantly and automatically serverless database for any large scale business. Quick access and response to data queries due to high speed in reading and writing data Create a powerful digital experience for your customers with real-time offers and agile access to DB with super-fast analysis and comparison for best recommendation Read full review Cons It's an enterprise level product so you need to have the budget for it. Challenging-to-impossible for a non-technical administrator to implement. It further locks you into Microsoft's ecosystem and doesn't play well with non-Microsoft software. Depending on your point of view, this can be a pro or a con. Read full review Expensive, so be careful of the use case. We had a thought time migrating from traditional DBs to Cosmos. Azure should provide a seamless platform for the migration of data from on-premises to cloud. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It's efficient, easy to scale, and works. We do have to do a bit of administration, but less now than when we started with this a couple of years ago. Microsoft continues to improve its self-management capability.
Read full review Usability It has very good compatibility and adaptability with other APIs and developers can safely create new apps because it is compatible with various tools and can be easily managed and run under the cloud, and in terms of security, it is one of the best of its kind, which is very powerful and excellent.
Read full review Support Rating Microsoft is the best when it comes to after-sales support. They have a well-structured training and knowledge base portal that anyone can use. They are usually quick to respond to cases and are on point for on-call support. I have no complaints from a support standpoint. Pretty happy with the support.
Read full review Alternatives Considered As I've mentioned, the biggest competitor to Azure Search is actually
Azure SQL Database . It doesn't have as many features, but it's more economical and most .Net applications will have one already. As long as you can arrive at a schema and ranking strategy, it's a "good enough" solution. There are a variety of search technologies (Lucene, Solr,
Elasticsearch ) that implement a search service. Some of them are even open source, though I would only say "free" if you do not value your time. They most likely need to be hosted via Container (or VM if you're old school), so you're incurring DevOps costs to not only set them up but monitor and maintain them yourself.
If you're already on AWS, there is almost no reason to use Azure Search. Unless you're already multi-cloud, desperately need the cognitive abilities, and don't mind a potential performance hit from looking across datacenters (hey, it could happen), you should probably just use
Amazon CloudSearch .
Read full review Cosmos DB is unique in the industry as a true multi-model, cloud-native database engine that comes with solutions for geo-redundancy, multi-master writes, (globally!) low latency, and cost-effective hosting built in . I've yet to see anything else that even comes close to the power that Cosmos DB packs into its solution. The simplicity and tooling support are nice bonus features as well.
Read full review Return on Investment Our internal market research illustrates that users are finding their desired information faster on account of autosuggest. Time spent on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased. Clicks required on checkout page (for conversions) is significantly decreased. Read full review It's made managing raw data much easier It provides a way to maintain raw data at a low cost It's easy to massage the data Read full review ScreenShots