Understanding indexes

An AIMP index is a logical namespace that holds a collection of documents, where each document is a collection of fields — which, in turn, are key-value pairs that contain your data.

Indexes are not the same as you’d find in a relational database. Think of an AIMP project as a database that can contain many indexes you can consider as a table, and within each index, you have many documents.

• RDBMS => Databases => Tables => Columns/Rows
• AIMP => Projects => Indexes => Documents with key-value pairs

AIMP provides a RESTful JSON-based API for interacting with document data. You can index, search, and delete documents by sending HTTP requests to the appropriate endpoints. These CRUD-like operations can take place at an individual document level or at the index level itself.

Index classes

AIMP provides two types of index classes based on access frequency: STANDARD and INFREQUENT_ACCESS.

• STANDARD indexes are optimized for high-throughput, low-latency access to your data.
• INFREQUENT_ACCESS indexes are optimized for infrequent access to your data.

Zero-copy index clone

Zero-copy index clone is a feature that allows you to create a new index by cloning an existing index, without physically copying index data.

This feature is useful when you want to create a new index with the same schema and data as an existing index, in order to load-test, develop, and experiment in an isolated environment.