Sonic: an Open Source Elasticsearch Alternative for Lighter Backends

November 10, 2022

When business messaging platform Crisp launched in 2015, it did so knowing its search functionality was lacking. Unfortunate, but least the company never pretended otherwise. The team found Elasticsearch was not scalable for its needs, and the SQL database it tried proved ponderous. Finally, in 2019, the solution emerged. Cofounder Valerian Saliou laid out the specifics in his blog post, “Announcing Sonic: A Super-Light Alternative to Elasticsearch.” He wrote:

“This was enough to justify the need for a tailor-made search solution. The Sonic project was born.

What is Sonic? Sonic can be found on GitHub as Sonic, a Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. Quoting what Sonic is from the GitHub page of the project: ‘Sonic is a fast, lightweight and schema-less search backend. It ingests search texts and identifier tuples, that can then be queried against in microseconds time. Sonic can be used as a simple alternative to super-heavy and full-featured search backends such as Elasicsearch in some use-cases. Sonic is an identifier index, rather than a document index; when queried, it returns IDs that can then be used to refer to the matched documents in an external database.’ Sonic is built in Rust, which ensures performance and stability. You can host it on a server of yours, and connect your apps to it over a LAN via Sonic Channel, a specialized protocol. You’ll then be able to issue search queries and push new index data from your apps — whichever programming language you work with. Sonic was designed to be fast and lightweight on resources.”

Not only do Crisp users get the benefits of this tool, but it is also available as open-source software. A few features of note include auto complete and typo correction, compatibility with Unicode, and user friendly libraries. See the detailed write-up for the developers’ approach to Sonic, the benefits and limitations, and implementation notes.

Cynthia Murrell, November 10, 2022

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Search

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.