Zinc Search engine. A lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch written in Go

by techplexon 12/3/2021, 7:23:03 PM with 13 comments
  • by xvilkaon 12/4/2021, 2:33:42 AM

    There are also Toshi[1] and Sonic[2] in Rust. And Vector[3] as a Logstash alternative too. There is an issue[4] proposing to integrate Vector with Sonic and Toshi. Maybe Zinc can pursue this goal too. Always good to see people who realize that Java is unwieldy monster that will eat all your memory. Native is a way to go for big systems.

    [1] https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi

    [2] https://github.com/valeriansaliou/sonic

    [3] https://vector.dev/

    [4] https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/issues/988

  • by pjzon 12/3/2021, 9:43:32 PM

    >(Kibana is not supported with zinc. Zinc provides its own UI).

    1. I was hoping for a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch. A new/different API means Zinc can't leverage existing tools that use Elasticsearch.

    2. I don't like that you're bundling zinc with a UI; that disadvantages anyone else trying to build a better UI and often (usually?) leads to tying the db too closely to the UI (or vice versa)

  • by rzzzton 12/3/2021, 10:51:20 PM

    Does it support boolean queries? Bluge, the library backing Zinc appears to have such a searcher, and I can see a few references in Zinc's code, but is it exposed for search expressions?

  • by bootcaton 12/3/2021, 10:08:39 PM

    I am staunch supporter of software which runs on minimal hardware or resources. Seems like an interesting project, looking forward towards distributed features !

  • by ochoseison 12/4/2021, 4:28:49 AM

    I wonder if this would be a good lightweight alternative to ES for a local development setup. At $work we use ES for deployed environments, but have thus far avoided running it locally because of the resource requirements.

  • by keyleon 12/3/2021, 9:34:52 PM

    Ha.

    Lovely, but the missing features is basically what makes Elasticsearch great!

        Missing features: 
    Clustering and High Availability
    Nothing that can't be fixed though.

  • by ordielon 12/3/2021, 10:03:37 PM

    When people say "Lightweight alternative" most of the time they are implying less features also, they are not lightweight just because

  • by maxperton 12/4/2021, 5:35:29 AM

    Would be nice to have some benchmarks against ES, Sonic, and Toshi. I am very much interested in stress-testing on large dataset.

  • by alisweon 12/4/2021, 7:02:16 AM

    I wonder why the choice of technology is even relevant? Because of the hype factor?

  • by nw05678on 12/3/2021, 9:58:50 PM

    I've always wanted a full text search engine akin to "sqlite".

  • by deknoson 12/4/2021, 4:17:41 PM

    we have alternatives to elasticsearch as listed here. what we do not have is a alternative to kibana. which works with elasticsearch/opensearch and the elasticsearchalternatives here.

  • by arafalovon 12/3/2021, 11:09:46 PM

    They had me at: "The only viable solution to search was elasticsearch".

    /s

  • by 02020202on 12/4/2021, 9:14:48 AM

    there are already Bleve and Riot search engines written in Go. i am always happy to have more options but in this case maybe if the effort would have been put into one of these two would be overall more beneficial for end users.