From time to time we receive questions about Disco’s technology underpinnings and whether it is robust enough to handle large amounts of data.  The short answer is yes:  Disco can handle some of the largest datasets likely to be found in litigation. 

While our engineers can provide a more detailed description, a high level, layman’s description is often helpful.  Disco uses RavenDB as the underlying database and Apache Lucene to handle the searching and indexing.

RavenDB is an open source, document oriented database. Document oriented databases are what help drive companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook.  As the name suggests, document oriented databases are ideal for data organized as discrete collections (figuratively called “documents”), which becomes an obvious choice to store the literal documents of a document review platform like Disco.  When retrieving a document, the database has to make only one call to the database instead of the many…