

Things learned using Elastic Search (2013) - Cieplak
http://sammaye.wordpress.com/2013/12/19/things-i-have-learnt-in-the-first-5-minutes-of-using-elastic-search/

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AznHisoka
Some of these points are valid, such as the verbose query language, horrible
diagnostics, as well as the ease of making serious, irreversible mistakes. If
you're starting ElasticSearch, I highly recommend:

\- Making daily backups with S3.

\- Having a replica physical cluster (note, not a replica node). Because
replica nodes can corrupt each other.

\- Forget about rivers. Implement your own. What I did was push row ids into a
Redis list, and when the list becomes filled with 100 IDs, I query all 100
items from my database, and index them into ElasticSearch. Nothing
complicated.

~~~
jasonkolb
Just curious, why do you say to forget about rivers? Did you run into
problems? It seems like kind of a nice way to bootstrap data into
Elasticsearch.

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snikch
While elastic search queries ARE verbose (we've clocked up a query 23 levels
deep in our app), the first example stated here is unnecessarily verbose. He's
using a `bool should` query, with only one value in it. A `bool should` is
basically an `or` statement, so he could replace the whole thing with the
single query he has inside it.

This definitely feels like a rant that picks up on a few issues with ES, and
then smothers it with a variety of things which are different, but not really
"issues". I've found the ES documentation to be a bit fragmented, but good
once you know where things are. It's not the most newbie friendly system, but
once you're up and running it's incredibly powerful.

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abroncs
> NOT EVERYONE USES COMPOSER!!!

Well, get with the times ffs.

Amuzingly, I recently integrated ES with a Yii app and it ran wonderfully.
Sped up our search considerably.

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fideloper
Anyone able to refute these points? As someone who's used Sphinx quite a lot,
and was hoping to dive I to ES, some of these points are disappointing to hear
(particularly prefix/infix support)

Some of these points aren't too important, like having to use composer (you
don't ever _have_ to use composer, by the way). The library file size I'm also
not too concerned about.

Result speed and the terrible docs are interesting, however.

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melvinmt
"It has terrible documentation"

They acknowledge this themselves as well, that's why they released a book that
should help first time users to navigate through ES:
[http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/elasticsearch-
definitive-g...](http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/elasticsearch-definitive-
guide)

~~~
saryant
To be fair, the documentation does seem to have improved quite a bit with the
1.1 and 1.2 releases. My biggest problem with it has been snippets of examples
in the query DSL sections with no clue as to where you put those snippets.
Some examples now show full curl commands which is a huge improvement.

~~~
jasonkolb
That's because there's no one place to put the snippets. They work in multiple
places, and can be embedded within one another. It's very powerful, and very
confusing to get started with.

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kitwalker12
I can't comment on this as it's a php installation but the rails integration
on elasticsearch was pretty easy and fast. It gave us so much speed that we
decided to use it as a full cms read data store for our website.

