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Introduction to searching in Atlan

Atlan uses Elasticsearch to power its search. For ultimate flexibility, we have also adopted Elastic's query DSL .

To explain all of the power and flexibility, there are two main areas you must consider when searching in Atlan:

  • The query defines what you want to find in your search
  • The attributes define the specific bits of information you can search against, and what details you want included in each result

Then, you can get a bit more advanced by adding in:

  • Whether you want to sort those results
  • How to page the results, when there are many of them
  • Whether you want to aggregate any information from those results

Atlan's search index is eventually consistent

Atlan's search index is updated asynchronously from metadata being persisted to the metastore. So there can be small delays between a create, update, or delete operation completing and being able to search for that same information. Usually this is almost immediate (less than 1 second), but if in code you try to immediately search for something you created or updated you may need a retry loop to find it.