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Data Science, Data Analytics
The Beginners’ Guide to Elasticsearch — Part 1
A brief introduction to Elasticsearch
If you would like to know what is Elasticsearch, why should we use Elasticsearch, what are the alternatives/competitors to Elasticsearch then you are in the right place. In this article, I will try to answer all these questions. So, let’s get started.
What is Elasticsearch
As mentioned on the official page, Elasticsearch — is a distributed, open-source search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene.
So, what does this mean?
Distributed — a distributed system contains multiple nodes/machines which are spread geographically but connected together so that they can communicate and coordinate to achieve a common goal.
Open-source — the original source code is freely available and can be modified.
Search & analytics engine — a system capable of searching a given text/keyword in the database and display relevant data to the end-users. This is much like Google or Bing search engine.
Data — Elasticsearch works with both structured and unstructured data such as textual, numerical, geospatial, etc.
Apache Lucene — Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine written in Java. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and Elasticsearch is built on top of Lucene.
Why use Elasticsearch
- Distributed: Elasticsearch is a distributed document store. The documents are stored in the nodes which are distributed across the cluster and can be accessed from any node.
- Scalable: Elasticsearch provides the ability to quickly increase or decrease the server (nodes). Elasticsearch automatically distributes the data and query load across all of the available nodes.
- Fast: Elasticsearch is blazing fast. It can search the document in near real-time usually less than a second. Note that there is little latency between the time when the documents are indexed and when the…
