SLI
SLI.SE is Sweden's hub for learning materials in education. The service is used by producers to disseminate information about their products, the retailer's e-commerce website and by teachers who are looking for educational materials appropriate to their courses of learning. The number of devices and users are growing steadily with thousands of teachers using SLI.SE daily as an important tool to enchance their professional lives.
“Our old site was based on MS-SQL Server with large amounts of data that is pre-prepared for searches, and a fairly sophisticated code to interpret queries and translate these to standard SQL Query questions. The system worked pretty well, but as the number of users grew uncontrollably we needed constantly better and better hardware to the database server. Also, to get really good results the user needed to be skilled at search - i.e. could perform searches with Boolean ”and” - ”and the inflected forms of words (”*”)”, says Måns Larsson, CTO.
An additional challenge faced during this project was that SLI.SE didn't exist in a single database, but in over 60 pieces of unique content from the producers. In order to produce the desired end result and increase effeicency, the whole system needed to be evaluated and modified. Commissioning Adeptic, AESS was implemented in a matter of days and the total process was streamlined.
“It is only in production environment that one really notices what needs to be adjusted” Måns continues. ”With Adeptic and the AESS technologies all our needs and desires were heard - nothing was impossible - a setting, you don't see very often”.
Every night thousands of products are exported to SLI.se together with order information. AESS feed of search information and search indexes are rebuilt every night to make SLI.SE ready for the next day's use.
“We use AESS in the current situation just to make searches and display results. When we display product details we use MS-SQL. I must say that we were astonished at the speed AESS delivers the search results. Even under severe pressure with many simultaneous searches, we have seen no significant deterioration.”
