Guidance required to design Azure Serach Indexes

Question

I started working on providing search capabilities in a web application and the source is our Enterprise SQL databases. Our application is based on Microservices Architecture and each service has a separate database in Azure SQL.

I am looking for guidance in how to design Indexes for all the services. User may want to search the terms that may span across multiple services.

So do I need to design one index per domain/service and have a SQL Indexer keep updating the Index. In that case I may end up with multiple indexes and will become difficult to query across indexes and show the result.

Or Do I need to create a very large index (with hundreds or thousands of fields together)? Querying may be easy but updating the index data will be challenging.

Looking for some guidance based on real experience and just some simple samples available.

Answer 1

@KiranKolli Thanks for asking question! It depends on the scenario. In general, unless you have specific reasons for having more than one (above site limits, content that is not supposed to be ranked against each other since it has nothing to do with the other, etc.), one is recommended. 

 You should think about your users (who are your users, what they need to look for, what they need access to, if they have content in common to look for...etc.) Answering your personas' scenarios would usually give you the answer of where your data must live.

Hope this helps.