What's your indexing strategy? The Data Triplex in the AI era

In the last 6 months, I have heard from countless enterprises that their focus for innovation has now shifted to search and AI, after having spent a decade on embracing the Modern Data Stack (MDS).? Both Google and Facebook famously use indexing to power everything from Google Search to Facebook Newsfeed. Several modern organizations have described how and why they are rapidly re-organizing engineering teams to put their real-time analytics, search and AI engineers together because all of these teams are basically working on indexing strategies whether its text indexing, vector indexing or real-time indexing for Kafka streams - all of which are essential for the AI era. The Data Triplex relies on three key components: Cloud OLTP Database, Cloud DWH, and Cloud Real-Time Indexing. Engineered to unlock the full potential of data-driven insights across structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, this infrastructure empowers organizations to thrive in the age of artificial intelligence.

1. Cloud OLTP Database: System of record

At the core of the data triplex lies the Cloud Database, serving as the foundation for transaction processing. OLTP systems are optimized for handling high volumes of concurrent transactions with unwavering reliability and efficiency. They ensure the seamless capture, storage, and retrieval of operational data, providing the backbone for day-to-day business operations.

Key features of Cloud OLTP database in the data triplex include:

• ACID compliance for maintaining data integrity and transactional consistency.
• Efficient transactional processing capabilities tailored for rapid data insertion, updates, and retrieval.
• Scalable and robust cloud architecture to support the evolving needs of modern businesses.

Design Choices: Choose between SQL or NoSQL?

Popular Cloud databases include Aurora, CockroachDB, DynamoDB, and MongoDB.

2. Cloud Data Warehouse/Lakehouse: Source of truth

Complementing Cloud databases, Cloud DWH serves as the source of truth, enabling organizations to derive actionable insights from vast volumes of data. OLAP systems are designed to handle complex analytical queries, multidimensional analysis, and advanced data modeling techniques. They empower users to explore data, uncover patterns, and make informed decisions based on comprehensive insights.

Key features of Cloud DWH in the data triplex include:

• Multidimensional data modeling capabilities for structuring data into dimensions, measures, and hierarchies.
• Advanced analytical functions, algorithms and ML capabilities to support complex calculations, forecasting, predictive modeling and model training
• Compute-storage separation for scalability, well suited for ad hoc analysis, internal BI dashboards and historical trends?

Design Choices: Warehouse or Lakehouse?

Popular Cloud DWHs include warehouses such as Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery and Databricks

3. Cloud Real-Time Indexing: System of intelligence

The third pillar in the data triplex is Cloud Real-Time Indexing, serving as the gateway to intelligence by optimizing for fast data access across semi-structured and unstructured data.? Real-Time Indexing facilitates rapid data retrieval, search, and analytics by continuously updating indexes to reflect the latest data changes. It empowers organizations to rapidly iterate and build modern applications such as real-time recommendations, anomaly detection, logistics tracking, game telemetry and user-facing analytics.? Your indexing strategy is the big unlock here.?

Key features of Real-Time Indexing in the triplex infrastructure include:

• Continuous indexing of data updates for real-time search and analytics
• Specialized indexing techniques for text search, vector search, and hybrid search with optimizations for JSON, time-series, geospatial and vector data?
• Ensure peak performance and reliability by avoiding the overhead of read replicas and minimizing use of secondary indexes in OLTP systems

Design Choices: Geospatial, Text, Vector or Converged Index?

Popular Real-Time Indexing databases include Elastic , Pinecone , Rockset (acquired by OpenAI)

Benefits of the Data Triplex Approach:

• Best price/performance: By utilizing the best tool for the job, organizations can achieve comprehensive insights into their data, driving informed decision-making and building real-time analytics, search, and AI applications with optimal latency and performance at the lowest total cost.
• Scalability and Performance: The modular design of the triplex infrastructure ensures scalability and performance, enabling organizations to handle growing data volumes, analytical workloads, and new user-facing search and AI applications with ease.
• Agility and Innovation: With the triplex approach, teams can adapt quickly to changing data schemas and query patterns, fostering innovation and agility in the AI era. According to folklore, one Facebook engineer famously built the “Like” button in a day. But in reality it was one of hundreds of experiments that their growth team could run because they had world class indexing capabilities.?What's your indexing strategy?