The newest version of Solutionator, our parametric search tool that allows you to design a mated set in a minute or less, has been rolling for a couple of months now on Samtec.com.
As we detailed in this introductory post, Solutionator boasts several powerful features to help you design your mated set solution in under a minute, including:
- Multi-select dropdown filters
- Instant match search capabilities
- Keyword, part number, and series matching
- Range based filters
- Breadcrumb history of your search
- A full-featured data grid
How Microsoft Azure Powers Solutionator 2.0
Given that Solutionator 2.0 sorts through hundreds of thousands of part numbers to display your mated set data in just seconds, some have been curious as to how we do this so quickly.
Well… there’s a lot of back end architecture that goes into a project like this, but the simple answer is… Microsoft Azure Search.
Continuing the trend of bringing Samtec.com and all of its functionality into the cloud, Solutionator 2.0 takes advantage of the same Azure platform as the product pages of the website, but taken to another level.
On top of the massive advantages of operating in the cloud, such as push-button scaling and near instant geo-replication to multiple datacenters, Azure Search takes search technology to another level.
Indexing Explained
The way web searches return results so quickly is by using a technology called indexing, which is a much more efficient way to search through large repositories of data without having to do it in a linear manner.
Imagine looking through a phone book (do people still use these?) to find someone with the last name of Smith starting from page one. Without having a reference point to the “S” section of the phone book, it would take you forever.
An index solves this problem by giving you a very accurate starting point of where to look. The result is you can find Mr. or Ms. Smith very quickly.
An online search index works in a similar way. The index stores several reference points to different areas of the search, or columns in a database, but it does it across hundreds of different data points.
When someone performs a search, it then is able to access these locations very quickly in its memory. It then uses combination of what the user entered to return all of the matching data. The result is the ability to filter through millions of rows of data with blazing fast speed.
Because Azure Search makes the creation and scaling of multiple indicies so effortless, and optimizes and manages them for you, this was the perfect platform for Solutionator 2.0.
The result is that your searches can be performed in just seconds, allowing you to design a mated set solution in under a minute.
Go ahead. Try it out at https://www.samtec.com/solutionator