search engine technology
A search engine is an information retrieval software program that discovers, crawls, transforms and stores information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries.
A search engine normally consists of four components, that are sear ...
is the main integration component in an
information system
An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...
. In a traditional business environment the architectural layer usually occupied by a relational database management system (RDBMS) is supplemented or replaced with a search engine or the indexing technology used to build search engines. Queries for information which would usually be performed using Structured Query Language (SQL) are replaced by keyword or fielded (or field-enabled) searches for structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data.
In a typical multi-tier or N tier architecture information is maintained in a data tier where it can be stored and retrieved from a database or file system. The data tier is queried by the logic or business tier when information is needed using a data retrieval language like SQL.
In a search-oriented architecture the data tier may be replaced or placed behind another tier which contains a search engine and search engine index which is queried instead of the database management system. Queries from the business tier are made in the search engine query language instead of SQL. The search engine itself crawls the relational database management system in addition to other traditional data sources such as web pages or traditional file systems and consolidates the results when queried.
The benefit of adding a search layer to the architecture stack is rapid response time large dynamic datasets made possible by search indexing technology such as an
inverted index
In computer science, an inverted index (also referred to as a postings list, postings file, or inverted file) is a database index storing a mapping from content, such as words or numbers, to its locations in a table, or in a document or a set of d ...
.
Contrast with
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Service-oriented architecture
In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provide ...
(SOA)
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Service-Oriented Modeling
Service-oriented modeling is the discipline of modeling business and software systems, for the purpose of designing and specifying service-oriented business systems within a variety of architectural styles and paradigms, such as application arch ...