You use federated search to query single or multiple databases in your local zone to find any media available to your local MediaCentral UX configuration. Federated search respects all user and role permissions, and search results only appear for media assets the user is qualified to view. This provides security for projects that include some confidential assets.

If you search across a large number of databases, however, federated search can slow down the speed with which the search query returns results, and a large search can affect performance within MediaCentral UX and potentially in your Interplay Production system. In addition, a federated search returns segregated results because as it tries to search across all systems it cannot treat all results as a large group — for example, a search by date returns results in blocks and not necessarily a merged result set.

The default search type for the Search bar is the federated search.