TableStorage.Abstractions.Trie

This project creates an "index" in Azure Table Storage using a trie-like structure to enable type-ahead style "begins with" search scenarios, e.g. "Jo" will yield "John Smith, Joe Taylor, Josephine Baker."

The index takes full advantage of the scalability of Azure Table Storage by partitioning each term. This allows for fast query time and not-great-but-not-too-terrible indexing time (benchmarks provided below), at the cost of space. But let's face it, space in Azure Table Storage is extremely cheap. At time of this writing, ATS can be obtained for as little as $0.07 per gigabyte per month.

Important Notes

1. This project runs terrible under the Azure Storage Emulator; probably because the emulator uses Sql Server LocalDB. If you're curious how well this project will work for you, try it using the real thing.
2. This library uses an underlying library to access Azure Table Storage. That library checks for table existence and creates it if it does not exist. While convenient, this has a performance penalty, so you'll want to cache instances of TrieSearch and MultiIndexTrieSearch, or implement them as singletons if you plan to use them heavily.

Features

• Works with POCOs (plain old CLR objects)
• Ability to index, reindex and remove from index your POCOs
• Ability to query the index
• MultiIndexTrieSearch manages multiple indexes, and allows you to query all of them at once and de-dupe the results. For instance, suppose you want to index your customers by full name, last name, and email. Let's use my name as an example (Giovanni Galbo) and suppose my email is gio@test.com. Imagine we query "g". This would yield results from all 3 indexes, but we'd only want one result to be presented. This is accomplished by de-duping. Let's use one more example, "Gina Smith." Typing a "g" would yield Giovanni Galbo and Gina Smith. Typing an "s" would yield just Gina Smith. The first results were 1 record from me (De-duped from 3 results) plus one for Gina, while the second result was returned from the last name index. The beauty of the multi-index is that it's all handled for you.
• Ability to set minimum index lengths. For instance, if you don't want type ahead for less than 3 characters, you can reduce the size of your index by limiting it to 3 characters.
• Ability to set a maximum index
• Optional case sensitivity

Usage

Create a single index

_fullNameIndex = new TrieSearch<Customer>("trieUnitTestFullNameIndex", "UseDevelopmentStorage=true", c => c.Id);

Here we set the name of the index (which translates to an Azure Table Storage table name), connection string, and the identifier, which translates to the row key in Azure Table Storage.

Creating a multi index

_multiIndexSearch = new MultiIndexTrieSearch<Customer>(new Dictionary<ITrieSearch<Customer>, Func<Customer, string>>
			{
				[_fullNameIndex] = c => c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName,
				[_lastNameIndex] = c => c.LastName,
				[_emailIndex] = c => c.Email
			});

Here we provide the multi index with a dictionary. The dictionary keys are your single indexes, and their values are expressions on how to construct the index. The first is for full name search, the second just for last name, and finally email.

The de-dupe function

Currently you need to tell the multi index how to de-dupe the search results. A future release may do this automatically for you, but for now you'll need to provide one. Here is an example:

_dedupeFunction = customers =>
			{
				var uniqueIds = customers.Select(c => c.Id).Distinct();
				var uniqueCustomers = new List<Customer>();
				foreach (var id in uniqueIds)
				{
					uniqueCustomers.Add(customers.First(c => c.Id == id));
				}

				return uniqueCustomers;
			};

Querying a single index

var results = await _fullNameIndex.FindAsync("j");

Querying a multi index

Querying a multi index is similar to querying the single index, but it requires the de-fupe function

var results = await _multiIndexSearch.FindAsync("j", _dedupeFunction);

Index Benchmarks (Adding entities to the index)

Note 1: These benchmarks were performed on an 5960X 8 core Intel CPU with 64GB of RAM. The network connection is 400mb download and 40mb upload. Results will vary with hardware and size of payload.

Note 2: One of the goals of these benchmarks was to find the best number for max connections, because the default number used by the Azure Table Storage SDK yields terrible results.

Note 3: These tests were run in an actual instance of Azure Table Storage. This project runs terrible under the Azure Storage Emulator; probably because the emulator uses Sql Server LocalDB.

Single Index

Run	Number Records	Num Connections	Elapsed Time (ms)
Run 1	500	Default	78969
Run 2	500	Default	83120
Run 3	500	Default	83579
Run 4	500	10	18214
Run 5	500	10	18236
Run 6	500	10	19803
Run 7	500	100	3200
Run 8	500	100	2878
Run 9	500	100	3321
Run 10	500	500	4561
Run 11	500	500	4617
Run 12	500	500	5139
Run 13	2000	Default	332174
Run 14	2000	Default	365315
Run 15	2000	Default	346757
Run 16	2000	10	97482
Run 17	2000	10	81003
Run 18	2000	10	81127
Run 19	2000	100	22199
Run 20	2000	100	10700
Run 21	2000	100	9991
Run 22	20000	500	11343
Run 23	20000	500	11146
Run 24	20000	500	9520
Run 22	20000	100	95109
Run 23	20000	100	113160
Run 24	20000	100	95105
Run 25	20000	500	91435
Run 26	20000	500	85268
Run 27	20000	500	76578
Run 28	20000	50	202670
Run 29	20000	50	164559
Run 30	20000	50	170916

Multi Index

Run	Number Records	Elapsed Time (ms)
Run 1	2000	32776
Run 2	2000	31741
Run 3	2000	31308

Query Benchmarks

Single Index

Run	Elapsed Time (ms)
Run 1	77
Run 2	78
Run 3	45

Multi Index

Run	Elapsed Time (ms)
Run 1	151
Run 2	83
Run 3	45