So for lots of reasons, we're excited to have taken a 'nosql' approach to our application - we're not using a traditional database system (like mysql for example) at all, and all the data is stored simply as JSON objects within 'Firebase' - now 'Google's Firebase' - one of the key reasons for taking this approach is to get significant speed and scale ability without stress / or sysadmin work. Algolia ( https://www.algolia.com/ ) is a fantastic piece of tech. which plays very nicely / natively with Firebase / JSON data structures, to facilitate the sort of user search / discovery experiences which used to cost a huge amount to build / craft (and take ages).
the tl;dr version is that we love algolia, and it does amazing things....