PeopleSoft recently released a new piece of functionality called “Elasticsearch,” and I wanted to take some time to talk a bit about the basics of this new technology and where you can get some more information.

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is a well distributed, open source, 3rd party search engine that also provides analytics. It is designed for horizontal scalability, reliability and easy management, making it highly adaptable between industries. PeopleSoft now offers a choice between Elasticsearch and Secure Enterprise Search (SES) within your PeopleSoft environment. The recommendation from PeopleSoft, however, is to pick Elasticsearch.

Why Elasticsearch?

From what I have heard, PeopleSoft’s choice to support Elasticsearch comes at the end of an interesting journey. Some of you may be asking, “Why Elasticsearch?” The answer: the PeopleSoft team wanted to meet the current and future needs of customers. Elasticsearch is consistently increasing the efficiency of both indexing and retrieving results, which positively impacts both the administrator’s and end user’s performance. It is also easier to deploy and maintain than previous search capabilities PeopleSoft has supported.

PeopleSoft Elasticsearch Architecture

SES has historically been challenging to deploy and struggles with large amounts of data. Elasticsearch is based on a simpler architecture and can scale for large amounts of data. It is better at building indices and retrieving data and can also provide end user transparency since many of the current features like related actions are still present. If you are planning to move to PeopleTools 8.56, Elasticsearch will be the only choice on that release. Further, Oracle will stop support of SES in April 2018.