Indexed Search, Without Losing the Last Five Minutes of Data

The upgrade to 2015x brought indexed search, which is faster than querying in real time and is the right default for a platform carrying product specifications, packaging BOMs, artwork, formulation and classification data. But indexing is not instantaneous: partial indexing took five minutes to complete, which created a five-minute window in which newly created data existed but could not be found. For users creating that data, the upgrade looked like a regression.

Rather than choose between the two search modes, the solution kept both. A custom mechanism lets users switch between indexed search and real-time search, so the speed of the index is the default and real-time querying is available for anything created inside the indexing window. Data generated in the last five minutes stays retrievable, and access to the most recent information was never interrupted.