Azure Data Catalog – Search functionality

Microsoft in the News

J.D. Power and Associates recently released their survey on Tablet satisfaction.  Microsoft’s Surface tablet came out on top in many categories, but most surprising was that overall, consumers were more satisfied with their Surface than they were with iPads.

According to J.D. Power, the Microsoft Surface has “expanded what tablets can do, and it sets the bar for customer satisfaction.”

The areas in which the Surface was rated the best were, internet connectivity, availability of official accessories, and the variety of pre-installed applications.

ADC – Search functionality        

In the last installment of this series on ADC we looked at the search menu.  This menu has some basic search options.  When faced with looking for very specific data assets it is worth looking at the full suite of search functions available.  The search bar can be used for basic searches such as a word search, “finance” or you can make it more complex such as searching for a property with a specific term such as “department:finance”.  Both of these are common in google, windows and other programs with search capabilities.  ADC expands on these with three additional options for searching;

Boolean – This is used to narrow a search “finance NOT head office”

Grouping – This is done by using parentheses to group logic “finance and (“head office” OR “main office”)”

Comparison – This is used to make comparisons “(starttime > “18/04/2017”) AND department:finance”

Matching operators

Symbol	Explanation
:	Items where a specific property has the search term eg. Department:finance
=,<,>	Comparison operators these are used to compare values and can be combined. E.g. <=
“ ”	Quotations are used to group strings as a single unit value e.g. “finance department”
NOT, AND, OR	Boolean conditions.
Has:	Has is used as an existence search.  If a given property has at least one element it will be returned by this operator. E.g. has:description

The search operators are not case sensitive, however capitalizing the words for the Boolean conditions does make the search easier to read and understand. Should you limit your search too much or your search returns no data you will be given this message:

Choosing the reset query box removes your entire query.  If you feel you have simply made a typo, it is much easier to simply click in the search box and make your change.  This will ensure you do not lose your query, forcing you to retype it instead of simply correcting a small error.

Currently exact match searching is not available.  ADC uses Prefix Match Semantics.  This means that when you search for “Sale” your search will return Sale, Sales, SaleData, and Salesman. 

More information on the algorith