Antenor Challenge
A national phone directory is tens of millions of records that people query approximately: misspelled names, partial addresses, the wrong category, and still expect the right answer instantly. In the CD-ROM era the constraint was brutal: all of that data had to fit and be searchable on optical media, on consumer hardware, with no server to lean on. A directory that took seconds to answer was a directory nobody used.
Then the internet inverted the problem again: the same tens of millions of records now had to serve high volumes of concurrent public queries online, without losing the sub-second response users had come to expect.
Solution
Antenor built XLBase, a highly compressed, high-performance search engine purpose-designed for this workload. On CD-ROM it packed tens of millions of listings into the space and access patterns of optical devices, and still returned query results in under 500 milliseconds. The compression was not a nice-to-have; it was what made a national directory viable on a disc.
When the directories moved online, the same engine was ported to server installations built for high-performance concurrent public access to the same body of data. One core architecture carried the product from optical media to the web, and across four national publishers: Telefónica Chile, Páginas Amarillas Argentina, Telelistas Brazil and QdQ Spain.
Stack
- Highly compressed database engine optimized for optical media (CD-ROM)
- Sub-500ms search over tens of millions of listings on constrained hardware
- Server deployments for high-concurrency public online access to the same data
- Per-country adaptation across four markets and two languages
Results
- Under 500ms query results across tens of millions of directory records
- The same XLBase engine carried the product from CD-ROM to high-concurrency web servers — and also powered legal case-law retrieval for Jurisprudencia Argentina
- Four national directory platforms in production: Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Spain
- One architecture reused across four markets, cutting delivery risk for each successive launch
