As compared with other search engines such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, there are several items to take into consideration.

Azure AI Search API Version

The Azure AI Search engine for Gaia was initially implemented using version 2024-05-01-preview.  This version provides features such as Semantic Search and Semantic Reranking that were otherwise not available in the regular versions.  The version to be used can be changed in the config.py file under the engines section.

CRUD and bulk operations

Azure doesn't support single CRUD (Create, Update and Delete) operations.  These operations need to be performed inside a bulk operation.  Having said this, the Gaia implementation internally builds the bulk payload that Azure requires for operations such as Index Document, Delete, Update and Upsert.

Update/Delete by query

Azure doesn't support updates or deletes by query.  A two step process of query and then update/delete will need to be performed.