The Benefits of Using Elasticsearch
You heard a lot about Elasticsearch but you haven’t really given it much thought. It is time that you learn whatever you can about it so you can make the most out of the tool. Elasticsearch is basically a search engine based on the Lucene library.
Introduction to Elasticsearch
It provides a multitenant and distributed full-text search engine with HTTP web interface as well as schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java but other official clients are available in .NET, PHP, Apache Groovy, Python and Ruby.
It is also released as open source under Apache License. Essentially, it is a tool used to search different kinds of documents. It is distinct because it provides scalable research having near real-time search. It would be easier if you consider the Elasticsearch tutorial. Meanwhile, here’s a closer look at what it can do:
It offers fast and incisive search
You already know that traditional SQL database management systems are not created for full-text searches. With this, they do not perform well with loose-structured raw data, which resides outside the database. With the same hardware, queries that would take more than ten seconds utilising SQL will return results in under ten milliseconds with Elasticsearch.
As a user, you can express a query using a simple language called Query DSL. This query studies one or many target values and scores every element in the results according to its close match. The operators will enable you to optimise simple or even complex queries that often return results from huge datasets in just a few milliseconds. You will realise that Elasticsearch is simpler and leaner compared to other database constrained tables, rows, fields, and columns.
It offers indexing documents to the repository
When it comes to indexing operation, Elasticsearch will convert raw data (like log files or message files) into internal documents before storing them in a basic data structure like JSON object. You must know every document is composed of a simple set of correlating values and keys.
If you want to add documents to Elasticsearch, it is simple and easy to automate. You just need to do an HTTP post, which can transmit your document as a JSON object.
It denormalises document storage
It is vital to note that Elasticsearch is not a relational database. When you are coming over from traditional databases, you need to set aside one important concept – normalisation. You must be aware that native Elasticsearch does not allow joins or subqueries so denormalising data is crucial. Elasticsearch will store documents once for every repository, which it resides.
Although this is considered counterintuitive from the perspective of traditional DBMS (Database Management System), it is useful for Elasticsearch. With this, the full-text searches are extremely fast because the documents are kept in close proximity. Ultimately, this design minimises the number of data reads and the Elasticsearch limits the index growth rate by compressing it.
It is broadly distributable
Keep in mind that Elasticsearch can accommodate petabytes of data because it can scale up to thousands of servers. Its massive capacity is the result of Elasticsearch’s elaborate and distributed architecture. In Elasticsearch, there are different delicate and intensive operations that happen automatically and subtly. These operations include the following:
• It partitions documents from distinct containers or shards.
• In multiple node clusters, it distributes the documents to shards, which resides in all nodes.
• It balances shards across different nodes in a cluster to manage the search load and indexing.
• With the use of replication, it can duplicate every shard to provide data redundancy and even failover.
• It routes requests from any node in the cluster to particular nodes having the specific data that you require.
• It seamlessly adds and integrates new nodes depending on the need to increase your cluster size.
• It helps redistribute shards to automatically recover from the loss of a particular node.
Aside from Elasticsearch, there are two things that you need to think about – Weka (Walkanato Environment for Knowledge Analysis) and Ansible. When it comes to analysing future trends, you can consider Weka. At the end of the Weka tutorial, you will learn how to use this collection of tools and algorithms for data analysis as well as predictive modeling.
Ansible, on the other hand, offers a simple IT automation engine. At the end of the Ansible tutorial, you will learn how to automate cloud provisioning, application deployment, configuration management and many IT needs. Essentially, it models your IT infrastructure by describing how all systems correlate rather than managing one system at any given time.