What do the service upgrades mean for Azure Search?

The document count limits were removed from the Basic and Standard pricing tiers. Being influenced mostly by the situation’s workload, these latest, improved and updated services also take advantage of the rapid indexing and querying performance at exactly the same price points.

The basic stage also now supports an increase in the number of indexes from 5 to 15. Moreover, in the Basic tier, Azure Search is capable of supporting over 15 data traces and indexers per service. As for the Standard 3 High Density pricing tier, (best for multi-tenant scenarios), over 200 million documents per partition limit was removed, only enforcing per-index limits.

Infinite document counts

These enhancements allowAzure Search to no longer enforce the document count limits on Basic and Standard services. However, storage limits are still enforced and being constantly examined and benchmarked have exposed some realistic limits to the new hardware.

Specific storage usage depends on several factors such as the number of fields, the size of the content in the fields, the search attributes defined in the index schema and others

Supported locations

The latest and updated hardware configurations are offered in most regions where Azure Search is offered. The updated hardware is accessible in the following regions around the globe: Brazil South, Canada Central, Central India, East US, North Central US, North Europe, South Central US, Southeast Asia, UK South, West Europe, and West US.

Azure Search started using the updated hardware for the newly created services back in late 2017 mainly in the regions mentioned above. Currently, existing services do not adhere to the upgraded limits. To learn more about which limits apply to an existing service, use the Azure portal to view limit information on your service’s overview page.

The regions still using the old Azure Search hardware are the following: Australia East, East Asia, Japan West, and West Central US.

 

Suggested Reading: 5 Azure performance metrics every administrator should keep in mind

How to enable the new hardware for Azure Search?

In order to create an Azure Search service using the new and updated hardware and limits, all you need to do is set up the Basic and Standard tier Azure Search service in one of the regions which support the new features. The newly created service will automatically use the upgraded hardware.

Suggested reading: