Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Integrating with AWS CloudSearch
Amazon CloudSearch is a search engine as a service from Amazon that allows users to
store their documents on CloudSearch, provides indexing on those documents and provides
a search engine kind of functionality with faceted search options. CloudSearch scales as the
number of documents increases with time. Using CloudSearch is quite easy—you just need
to create one CloudSearch domain where you need to specify the attributes of each docu-
ment you are going to store. Appropriate data types are provided in order to improve the
search functionality.
To store a document in CloudSearch, you have to generate your data in SDF format. SDF is
nothing but Search Document Format, which is a JSON document that holds the metadata
about the document with actual data. Once the document is stored on CloudSearch, you can
simply search for the document using the CloudSearch console or search API given by
Amazon.
There might be a use case where you want to use DynamoDB as your storage tool, and you
want to implement a use case where end users need to search from a range of items. In this
case, if the search functionality is a primary requirement, then you should use DynamoDB
for storage and CloudSearch for search functionality. You can use DynamoDB as primary
data storage unit and keep a copy of this data on CloudSearch to deal with faster-searching
requirements. Consider an example of a bookstore application where users will look to
search for topics online with book name, author name, year of publishing, and so on. For
such kind of use case, CloudSearch is the best fit.
In order to use CloudSearch with DynamoDB, perform the following steps:
1. Configure CloudSearch domain
2. Export data from DynamoDB to CloudSearch
