With SingleStore Helios®, we continuously strive to elevate our users' experience, focusing on speed, efficiency and technical excellence.
One of our latest updates centers around significant performance optimizations to the Command + K feature — our powerful, unified search interface.
Understanding Command + K search on Helios
Command + K search in Helios operates entirely on the frontend. When users invoke the search, our frontend directly queries the information_schema of the database via WebSockets, fetching the necessary content dynamically to surface relevant results. Every activation of the search box initiates a sequence of SQL queries from the frontend, retrieving various database items like views, aggregates, procedures, pipelines, tables and UDFs (user-defined functions).
Technical performance improvements
Prior to optimization, activating Command + K resulted in substantial workloads:
- One of our internal organizations manages over 150 databases on Helios, with each search invocation executing over 2,500 individual SQL queries.
- Combined with React rendering overhead, the total execution time amounted to approximately 730 seconds, including parallel execution durations averaging 120+ seconds per database item.
Recognizing the critical need for enhancement, we implemented strategic optimizations across both SQL and React layers:
SQL optimizations
- Unified SQL query approach. Capitalizing on SingleStore’s powerful and efficient query engine, we consolidated multiple SQL queries for various database items into a single unified query using SQL unions. This method leverages SingleStore’s robust architecture, allowing significant query consolidation without any performance degradation.
React optimizations
- Refactoring rendering logic. Completely restructured our React rendering logic from the ground up.
- Removal of redundant logic. Eliminated unnecessary React hooks (
useEffects,useStates), excessive loops and redundant state updates, significantly streamlining the React rendering pipeline.
Quantified impact of optimizations
The resulting improvements were remarkable:
Metric | Before optimization | After optimization | Improvement |
SQL queries | 2,500+ | 96 | ~96% reduction |
Execution time (sequential) | ~730 seconds | ~20 seconds | ~97% reduction |
Execution time (parallel) | ~120 seconds | ~20 seconds | ~84% improvement |
Collectively, these enhancements provided users with at least 5x faster, highly efficient search experience.
User experience enhancements
In addition to technical improvements, we enhanced user interactions with Command + K:
- Streamlined UI. Redesigned interface for greater clarity and ease of use.
- Optimized keyboard navigation. Enhanced speed and accessibility through advanced keyboard shortcuts.
- Advanced fuzzy matching. Improved search reliability, effectively handling misspellings (e.g., "daranase" correctly returning "database").
- Sectional search capability. Quickly identify sections including tables, without needing precise details.
- Instantaneous search results. Instant visual feedback during typing, enhancing responsiveness.
Looking forward
We remain dedicated to ongoing optimization and enhancement, with more improvements already underway. Stay tuned for future updates!
