The Microsoft Azure team announced the general availability of many new additions today for Azure Search. Originally available only in the preview, the latest REST API version and .NET SDK are now available to the public and support a slew of new APIs and features.
New GA APIs
- Blob Indexer allows you to parse and index text from common file formats such as Office documents, PDF, and HTML. NOTE: CSV and JSON support is still in preview.
- Table Indexer enables you to ingest data from an Azure Table store.
- Custom Analyzers enable you to take control over the process of lexical analysis that’s performed over the content of your documents and query terms. For example, custom analyzers enable support for Phonetic search. For more information, read more on custom analyzers.
- Analyze API allows you to test built-in and custom analyzers to see how the analyzer breaks text into tokens.
- ETag Support allows you to safely update index definitions, indexers, and data sources concurrently.
The following REST API and .NET SDKs are GA:
- Service REST API version (2016-09-01), which includes all of the GA features noted in the previous section.
- A .NET SDK equivalent of the Service REST API (2016-09-01).
- A .NET SDK for management operations (Microsoft.Azure.Management.Search), which is the first .NET SDK for Search service and api-key management.
The release didn’t include the intended CSV and JSON support in Blob indexer nor did it add moreLikeThis, a query to find related documents. These features are still available in the Azure Search 2015-02-28 REST API preview and might be in store for a future release.
