We can add some use cases of Elastic and Solr, which are similar products. Both tools are text search (text search), i.e., they are suitable when user searches are based on free text fields such as description or name.
Some examples that justify the adoption of a full text search tool:
- Example 1: what records have the word "television" in their description.
- Example 2: which records have a name similar to "milestone", such as milestones, rings and rings.
- Example 3: which records have the words "database" and "data" separated by up to 2 words away.
- Example 4 (advanced): which records are similar to "star Trek", such as "Battlestar Galactica".
A relational database even has these features, but it will never be as efficient as a specialized search engine (Elastic and Solr), because it is optimized for non-textual searches, which is exactly the opposite of a full text search tool.