Unify Your Data: Combining Internal APIs and Databases into a Single Search

In today's complex software landscape, data is rarely in one place. Your customer's basic profile might live in a PostgreSQL database, their order history in an internal microservice, and their support interactions on a third-party platform like Zendesk. For developers, this means a simple request—"get a complete view of this customer"—can trigger a cascade of complex, brittle, and time-consuming integration work.

You have to write code to query the database, make a separate authenticated call to the internal API, and then another to the external service. You then need to stitch it all together, handle potential errors from each source, and hope none of the underlying APIs change without notice.

There is a better way. By treating data retrieval as a programmable, manageable asset, you can abstract away this complexity entirely. This is the core idea behind Search as Software: creating a unified search layer that turns scattered data points into a single, intelligent, and consumable API.

The Hidden Costs of Data Silos

When your data is fragmented across different systems, the challenges go far beyond simple inconvenience. These data silos introduce significant friction and risk into your development lifecycle.

• High Developer Overhead: Engineers spend valuable time writing and maintaining boilerplate code to connect to various data sources. This is undifferentiated work that doesn't create user value but is a constant drain on resources.
• Brittle Integrations: Application logic becomes tightly coupled to the specific implementation of each data source. If the orders-api team renames an endpoint or a database schema changes, client applications break.
• Security Vulnerabilities: Spreading database credentials, internal service tokens, and third-party API keys across multiple applications increases your attack surface. A vulnerability in one application could potentially expose credentials for your entire data stack.
• Inconsistent Logic: Without a central source of truth, different teams may implement the same data retrieval logic in slightly different ways, leading to inconsistent results and a confusing user experience.

The Solution: Intelligent Agents as a Unified API

Instead of forcing every application to understand the complex map of your data, you can encapsulate that logic within a dedicated search agent.

An agent, in the context of Searches.do, is a piece of code that defines a complete data retrieval workflow. It's Business-as-Code. This agent knows exactly where to go and what to do to fulfill a specific data request.

For our "complete customer view" example, a single agent named get-customer-360 could be programmed to:

1. Accept an email address as its only input.
2. Query the main database to fetch the core user record.
3. Use the user ID to make a secure, internal call to your orders-api.
4. Use the email to make a call to the Zendesk API for recent support tickets.
5. Aggregate and format the data from all three sources into a clean, consistent JSON object.
6. Return the unified object to the caller.

The application calling this agent doesn't need to know about PostgreSQL, microservices, or Zendesk. It just needs to make one simple, secure API call.

How to Build a Unified Search with Searches.do

Creating this powerful abstraction layer is remarkably straightforward. The entire workflow is designed to turn complexity into a simple, reusable service.

Step 1: Define Your Agent's Logic

Within the Searches.do platform, you define your agent. This is where you write the multi-step logic. You specify the required inputs (like email) and orchestrate the calls to your various data sources, transforming and combining the results as needed. All credentials and keys are stored securely in the agent's environment, never in your client-side code.

Step 2: Deploy as a Secure API

Once defined, your agent is deployed with a single command. It instantly becomes a stable, secure, and scalable API endpoint managed by Searches.do. All the complexity of authentication, logging, and error handling is managed for you.

Step 3: Consume Your Intelligent Search

Now, any application—be it a web frontend, a mobile app, or another backend service—can use this new, powerful search with a simple and clean SDK call.

Consider how simple it is to get a unified customer profile from your application code:

import { createClient } from 'searches.do';

// Initialize the client with your API key
const searches = createClient(process.env.DO_API_KEY);

// Get a complete customer profile with a single, simple call
async function getCustomer360(customerEmail: string) {
  console.log(`Fetching unified profile for ${customerEmail}...`);

  const profile = await searches.run('get-customer-360', {
    email: customerEmail
  });

  // profile now contains cleanly merged data from your database AND internal APIs
  console.log('Unified Customer Profile:', profile);
  /* Example output:
  {
    "id": "db_user_123",
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "email": "jane.doe@example.com",
    "signupDate": "2023-01-15T10:00:00Z",
    "recentOrders": [
      { "orderId": "order_abc", "total": 99.99, "status": "shipped" }
    ],
    "supportTickets": [
      { "ticketId": 789, "subject": "Question about billing", "status": "closed" }
    ]
  }
  */

  return profile;
}

getCustomer360('jane.doe@example.com');

The calling code is clean, declarative, and completely decoupled from the underlying data sources.

The Transformative Benefits of a Unified Search Layer

Adopting an agentic workflow for data retrieval delivers powerful advantages across your entire organization.

• Radical Simplicity: Developers no longer need to be experts in every database and API. They can consume rich, aggregated data through a simple, well-documented search API.
• Centralized Security: By abstracting data access behind a single endpoint, you eliminate credential sprawl. You can manage access control, auditing, and rate-limiting from one central place, significantly reducing your security risks.
• Unmatched Agility: Need to migrate from one CRM to another? Or refactor your orders-api? Just update the get-customer-360 agent. All consuming applications continue to work without a single line of code changed.
• Guaranteed Consistency: Every part of your business gets the exact same view of the customer because they all use the same search agent. This eliminates data discrepancies and ensures your organization runs on a single source of truth.

Stop letting data silos dictate your architecture and slow down your teams. It's time to treat complex data retrieval not as a chore, but as first-class software.

Ready to unify your data landscape? Discover how Searches.do can turn your complex queries into simple, powerful Services-as-Software.