Elasticsearch works by retrieving and managing document-oriented and semi-structured data. Internally, the basic principle of how Elasticsearch works is the “shared nothing” architecture. The primary data structure Elasticsearch uses is an inverted index managed using Apache Lucene’s APIs.
One question we ran across in our research was “What is Elasticsearch and why is it important?”.
Over the years, Elasticsearch and the ecosystem of components that’s grown around it called the “Elastic Stack” has been used for a growing number of use cases, from simple search on a website or document, collecting and analyzing log data, to a business intelligence tool for data analysis and visualization.
You might be asking “What is Elasticsearch and why should you care?”
It’s no surprise that Elasticsearch is steadily gaining ground in the site search domain sphere. Enterprise search —- Elasticsearch allows enterprise-wide search that includes document search, E-commerce product search, blog search, people search, and any form of search you can think of.
Cisco is also using Elasticsearch to leverage data to detect and defeat hackers and fight cyber threats. Public data like social media conversations can be mined by using Elasticsearch to do real-time analysis, resulting in a social sentiment analysis to understand customers.
A query we ran across in our research was “What is a document in Elasticsearch?”.
In Elasticsearch, a document can be more than just text, it can be any structured data encoded in JSON. That data can be things like numbers, strings, and dates.
How is data distributed in Elasticsearch?
The documents stored in Elasticsearch are distributed across different containers known as shards, which are duplicated to provide redundant copies of the data in case of hardware failure. The distributed nature of Elasticsearch allows it to scale out to hundreds (or even thousands) of servers and handle petabytes of data.
Where is Elasticsearch data stored?
All the data in Elasticsearch is internally stored in Apache Lucene as an inverted index . Although data is stored in Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch is what makes it distributed and provides the easy-to-use APIs. This Elasticsearch tutorial is an excerpt taken from the book,’ Learning Elasticsearch ‘ written by Abhishek Andhavarapu.
What happens when you Index in Elasticsearch?
Once indexed in Elasticsearch, users can run complex queries against their data and use aggregations to retrieve complex summaries of their data. From Kibana, users can create powerful visualizations of their data, share dashboards, and manage the Elastic Stack. What is an Elasticsearch index?
Does Elasticsearch support geospatial data?
At elasticsearch context it is a collection of types and documents, more like a database is a collection of tables and rows. By default all fields in elasticsearch are stored into a Lucene data structure from which it can be efficiently be queried. Elasticsearch does support indexed geospatial data, documentation can be found from here.