Elasticsearch Distributed NoSQL Database – What Is It and Should You Use It?

Are you trying to decide whether or not Elasticsearch might be right for your company? Here is a look at its benefits.

• What is Elasticsearch?
• Features
• One Programmer’s Perspective
• Strong Elasticsearch Hosting

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is a full-text, distributed NoSQL database. In other words, it uses documents rather than schema or tables. It’s a free, open source tool that allows for real-time searching and analyzing of your data. People appreciate this system because it allows you to run metrics on your data immediately, so you can understand it right away, on an ongoing basis.

It is particularly popular in the United States and the United Kingdom, with 63% and 21% of users respectively.

Here is a look at the strengths of this tool via the official site and Dutch programmer Gabriel Ajabahian.

Features

Here are some of the strongest features of Elasticsearch:

Real-Time Analysis

By integrating a rapid, high-powered search mechanism with strong analytics features, you are able to have a much better grasp of the nature of your data. By finding out more about your data, you can build a better business.

After all, perhaps the author of the Sherlock Holmes series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, said it best: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” he said. “Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Broad Distribution

Scalability is obviously a major part of computing in 2016. With Elasticsearch, you can spread out horizontally as your system expands. All you need to do is add nodes. The additional machines will simply be incorporated into the reach of the software. You can distribute your data to a huge degree and the tool continues to work seamlessly.

Reliability

An Elastisearch cluster will determine when a node isn’t functioning properly and redirect data to other locations so that your information is protected and easily manageable.

More than One Company or Division

You don’t have to just use one index but can have several, and you can gather data from them in combination or one at a time. You can also create aliases so that you are running the data through a filter.

Full-Text

Distribution is achieved via Apache Lucene so that you have access to strong open source full-text searching. “Powerful, developer-friendly query API supports multilingual search, geolocation, contextual did-you-mean suggestions, autocomplete, and result snippets,” notes the official site.

Documents

You can store sophisticated business information as a structured JSON document within Elasticsearch. Everything automatically gets integrated into the index. Plus, you can check all indices with one request, so that you can quickly answer complicated questions.

No Schema

You can get up and running almost immediately with Elastisearch. You just index a JSON document. The program knows to identify the structure and format of the data and generate an index so that it can be searched.

RESTful API

The API is central to Elasticsearch. You can conduct just about any task with a RESTful API, via JSON through HTTP. There are libraries suited to numerous scripting languages.

Persistence

The integrity of your data is fundamental to this system. Any edits that occur are written to more than one mode immediately so that it’s rare you will ever lose data or not see any changes properly take effect.

Open Source License

Elasticsearch uses the open source Apache 2 license, which allows you to install it, work with it, and customize it completely for free. Apache 2 is one of the most user-friendly licenses available for open source apps.

Apache Lucene

The Apache name is the basis for this system. “Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured Information Retrieval library, written in Java,” explains the official site. “Elasticsearch uses Lucene internally to build its state of the art distributed search and analytics capabilities.”

One Programmer’s Perspective

Ajabahian explains that Elastisearch has various use cases. You can store your blog in the program to make it easy to search, for instance. That’s not immediately possible with a traditional SQL database.

Also, you want to be able to run analysis on your data as quickly as possible. This tool has Logstash and Kibanato as components, allowing you to go beyond finding what you need to checking metrics on the data.

Plus, says Ajabahian, you can keep your data stored in this system, even if it has diverse characteristics and schemas. “Since Elasticsearch is schemaless, it won’t matter that you store various documents there,” he says. “[Y]ou will still be able to search them easily and quickly.”

Additionally, Kibana gives you a control panel through which people who need to work with data but do not have technical skills can do so intuitively and with little training.

Finally, Ajabahian notes that the speed of Elasticsearch really is incredible. You can index millions of documents and search them all at once in less than a second.

Strong Elasticsearch Hosting

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