Indexed Search Retirement

What's being done?

GRAX is ending support for Indexed Search, previously referred to as "Advanced Search."

This feature let users index data from their backups into the application's Postgres database for purposes of real-time search.

Why is GRAX retiring support for this feature?

GRAX has now released Global Search, a search tool that allows the user to find data across all of their Salesforce data backed up by GRAX. Users can filter based on system timestamp fields, record status, and even field values to discover the data they need. This technology is based natively on the underlying GRAX data format and requires no upfront indexing time besides backups themselves. All data and fields backed up by GRAX are available without additional configuration or cost.

Indexed Search, by nature, duplicated a significant portion of customer datasets into the application database. This had a number of negative impacts:

1. Customer databases, previously only for application metadata, grew to be very large and required significant maintenance, resources, and budget.
2. Indexing Salesforce records into Postgres is many times more expensive than writing that same data to S3, often doubling the TCO of GRAX.
3. Searching records requires forethought and configuration, as only objects that were indexed were searchable.
4. Search indexing ran after backups completed, meaning data was not searchable until hours after it was backed up.

How does this impact me?

Transition

New environments and GRAX applications do not have Indexed Search enabled. Existing users of indexed search are being contacted by the GRAX team to discuss a migration to Global Search and the expected impact on a case-by-case basis. Any reported issues with Indexed Search after the given date are to be met with update requests.

Transition of Search functionality does not impact other primary features of the GRAX application.

Cost

For users of Indexed Search who use their own infrastructure, the cost of that infrastructure is expected to reduce in proportion to the amount of data indexed and search traffic. Indexed data often outweighs the rest of the database significantly, so Postgres storage utilization and required resources are expected to drop significantly. Traffic to the DB is also expected to drop, although the scale of this change is highly dependent on org size, search users/traffic, version turnover rate, and other factors.

What's the recommended workaround?

To avoid interruptions or issues with unsupported features, change over to Global Search as early as possible. For assistance, contact GRAX Support.

Timing

GRAX support for Indexed Search ends on September 30, 2023.

How do I get more information?

If you have questions or need more information, please open a support ticket.