Search Appliance - 4D Style

Technical limitations and poor performance of a legacy ColdFusion/MS Access system provided NowData with an opportunity to create a blazingly-fast keyword indexing appliance that is now used every day at one of the most respected and well-known medical institutions in the world.

Google Appliance?

A variety of search/indexing applications appliances were evaluated (including Google), but none offered the desired flexibility and security requirements.

NowData successfully created an easy-to-use, stand-alone data warehouse-style system capable of:

• Keyword-index thousands of documents.
• Combine document keyword/meta information with associated database record field content.
• Receive document and database updates via incoming web service connections.
• Provide custom and configurable search results capabilities. Including variable ranking and filtering features.
• Provide search results in sub-second time.
• Automated database and system backup providing simple and quick disaster recovery.

Economical? No doubt about it.

A Mac Mini was used to host the completed system for proof-of-concept demonstrations and testing. The mini combined with 4D v11 Web Application Server did so well in performance tests, it was determined that higher-end hardware was simply not necessary. Today, this system provides reliable lookup functionality for thousands of users all accessing the information from web browsers.