
Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide - singold
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/index.html
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lobster_johnson
What I really miss from the official docs is a reference. Something that lists
all endpoint sand gives a pseudo-BNF schema overview. With the current docs,
seeing all the possible permutations possible within the JSON structure is
left as an exercise for the reader; it really requires reading the
descriptions of the APIs very closely.

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jolynch
I wish they did this and had a better search interface. Their current "all in
one bar + suggest" functionality works somewhat poorly for me.

Also I feel like they could reduce the needs for super great API docs if they
had something like a query optimizer so that I don't have to care about the
exact way that ES translates my queries into Lucene queries. My favorite bit
is how if you permute your filters and queries in the wrong order you end up
completely killing your performance (filter then query or query then filter).

~~~
lobster_johnson
I believe filters and queries are in the process of being merged. Quite
possibly they are moving towards having some kind of planner.

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Psyonic
They are. Filters are going away in 2.0.

[https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-2.0.0.beta1-coming...](https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-2.0.0.beta1-coming-
soon)

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lesingerouge
This guide is pretty good and gives you a comprehensive view of Elasticsearch,
but to me it was a bit confusing when I first read it. If you are looking for
a more "tutorial" style book, with some examples and use-cases, I would
recommend "Elasticsearch in action"[0].

I might be biased towards Manning books, but I find their style and ELI5
wording to be very helpful as an introduction to a subject.

[0] [http://www.manning.com/hinman/](http://www.manning.com/hinman/)

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caspereeko
I was about the hit the purchase button!, thanks :D

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benburton
How is this different from the usual API docs? I'm not saying that it isn't,
I'm just curious as to how it is.

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Rapzid
In my experience as you are learning to use ElasticSearch during an
implementation, or even going back to reference there is a high-ish
probability you will need the manual and the definitive guide. Really, I think
they ought to be combined in some way because there are huge gaps in the docs.

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craigching
I bought the book and I'll say I was disappointed with the book. A couple of
points, though. 1. The topic is huge, it's hard to cover everything because
the way you can query and setup your mappings is really very open-ended. 2.
The book is a good way to get started, but it lacks as a reference. See point
1., a reference may not be possible.

The best way to learn ES is to set yourself up with a scripting language
(python, ruby, etc.) and prototype _everything_ , then apply what you learned
to your language of chocie (i.e. Java if the scripting language isn't your
language of choice).

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richardbrevig
When I was looking for a full-text search solution a few months ago, this
guide sold me on Elastic.

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applecore
How is this different from Apache Lucene?

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lobster_johnson
ElasticSearch is a complete, distributed search engine. It runs as a daemon,
does sharing and clustering, provides APIs etc. Lucene is just a library.
ElasticSearch uses Lucene internally.

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MichaelGG
And I'll say it again: Elasticsearch is one of the few things that lives up to
its hype. It really is that good. Indexing, clustering, It Just Works. I'm
very impressed with them and it's a refreshing change from other very hyped
tech.

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jordanthoms
I actually have quite a few gripes with Elasticsearch. It's a pain to manage -
there seems to be no way of killing long-running queries other than restarting
it (so if you have users using kibana etc at some point someone will submit a
impossibly hard query and kill the server), the quality of the search results
just isn't that good and it takes a lot of customization to improve it - I've
never been impressed with the results from any of the large deployments (e.g.
github). Ideally it would come with good tokenization and synonyms etc out of
the box rather than every deployment having to tinker with settings until it
seems to work.

That said ELK is great overall and I would still use it for user-facing
search, but I think there is still a lot to improve.

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dayone
jordan, agree fully with your assessment. i have experienced significant
challenges in keeping elasticsearch in green since it just loves to failover
at times without prior notice, while seeming to work smoothly otherwise!

