#32: Elasticsearch — lightning-fast search at scale with ease

Elasticsearch: Easy, fast, and reliable

Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open source full-text search and analytics engine; it allows you to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data quickly and near real-time. As one of our guests, Jay Miller says, Elasticsearch is “the original idea of making search easy, fast, reliable.” Today with Jay Miller and Ricardo Ferreira, we'll discuss the success cases, tips, why you should use a search engine in your project, and where the project is headed in the future.

Ingesting data into Elasticsearch

There’s no one right way to ingest data into Elasticsearch; our guests say it depends on your architecture. Jay Miller asks us to consider these questions.

• What does the data look like?
• Does the data need to be worked on prior to ingesting it into Elasticsearch?
• Are you using it in some type of programming language?

Jay Miller adds, “Decide what's going to be the easiest for you to maintain, whether you’re controlling your ingestion from within your project, or if you’re going to add a layer on to it to keep it separated from the rest of the project.”

Elasticsearch supports database aggregation

Database aggregation support in Elasticsearch is powerful because, as Ricardo says, “it allows us different contexts to request and execute aggregations.” He names different programming languages you can use, such as Java, Go, Python, C++, C Sharp, .Net, REST, and Kibana. Ricardo adds, “There’s also built-in support for custom aggregations.”

When not to use Elasticsearch

“Just because Elasticsearch is scalable,” explains Ricardo Ferreira, “it doesn't mean that it will play well with every single use case.” Elasticsearch may not be the best choice when handling transactions, “If you're looking for a highly transactional system that relies on ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) you probably will miss one of those letters there. You will have atomicity, isolation, and durability, but not consistency.”

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