blog/ribw/what-is-elasticsearch-and-why-should-you-care/index.html (view raw)
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6<title>What is ElasticSearch and why should you care?</title>
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11<p>ElasticSearch is a giant search index with powerful analytics capabilities. It’s like a database and search engine on steroids, really easy and fast to get up and running. One can think of it as your own Google, a search engine with analytics.</p>
12<div class="date-created-modified">Created 2020-03-18<br>
13Modified 2020-03-27</div>
14<p>ElasticSearch is rich, stable, performs well, is well maintained, and able to scale to petabytes of any kind of data, whether it’s structured, semi-structured or not at all. It’s cost-effective and can be used to make business decisions.</p>
15<p>Or, described in 10 seconds:</p>
16<blockquote>
17<p>Schema-free, REST & JSON based distributed document store
18Open source: Apache License 2.0
19Zero configuration</p>
20</blockquote>
21<p>-- Alex Reelsen</p>
22<h2 class="title" id="basic_capabilities"><a class="anchor" href="#basic_capabilities">¶</a>Basic capabilities</h2>
23<p>ElasticSearch lets you ask questions about your data, not just make queries. You may think SQL can do this too, but what’s important is making a pipeline of facets, and feed the results from query to query.</p>
24<p>Instead of changing your data, you can be flexible with your questions with no need to re-index it every time the questions change.</p>
25<p>ElasticSearch is not just to search for full-text data, either. It can search for structured data and return more than just the results. It also yields additional data, such as ranking, highlights, and allows for pagination.</p>
26<p>It doesn’t take a lot of configuration to get running, either, which can be a good boost on productivity.</p>
27<h2 id="how_does_it_work_"><a class="anchor" href="#how_does_it_work_">¶</a>How does it work?</h2>
28<p>ElasticSearch depends on Java, and can work in a distributed cluster if you execute multiple instances. Data will be replicated and sharded as needed. The current version at the time of writing is 7.6.1, and it’s being developed fast!</p>
29<p>It also has support for plugins, with an ever-growing ecosystem and integration on many programming languages. Tools around it are being built around it, too, like Kibana which helps you visualize your data.</p>
30<p>The way you use it is through a JSON API, served over HTTP/S.</p>
31<h2 id="how_can_i_use_it_"><a class="anchor" href="#how_can_i_use_it_">¶</a>How can I use it?</h2>
32<p><a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">You can try ElasticSearch out for free on Elastic Cloud</a>, however, it can also be <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch">downloaded and ran offline</a>, which is what we’ll do. Download the file corresponding to your operating system, unzip it, and execute the binary. Running it is as simple as that!</p>
33<p>Now you can make queries to it over HTTP, with for example <code>curl</code>:</p>
34<pre><code>curl -X PUT localhost:9200/orders/order/1 -d '
35{
36 "created_at": "2013/09/05 15:45:10",
37 "items": [
38 {
39 name: "HD Monitor"
40 }
41 ],
42 "total": 249.95
43}'
44</code></pre>
45<p>This will create a new order with some information, such as when it was created, what items it contains, and the total cost of the order.</p>
46<p>You can then query or filter as needed, script it or even create statistics.</p>
47<h2 id="references"><a class="anchor" href="#references">¶</a>References</h2>
48<ul>
49<li><a href="https://youtu.be/sKnkQSec1U0">YouTube – What is Elasticsearch?</a></li>
50<li><a href="https://youtu.be/yWNiRC_hUAw">YouTube – GOTO 2013 • Elasticsearch – Beyond Full-text Search • Alex Reelsen</a></li>
51<li><a href="https://www.elastic.co/kibana">Kibana – Your window into the Elastic Stack</a></li>
52<li><a href="https://www.elastic.co/guide/index.html">Elastic Stack and Product Documentation</a></li>
53</ul>
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