ElasticSearch

ElasticSearch is a flexible and powerful open source, distributed RESTful search engine and analytics engine for the cloud. It is developed in Java. Elasticsearch allows you to start small, but will grow with your business. It is built to scale horizontally out of the box.

ElasticSearch is a highly available and distributed search engine. Each index is broken down into shards, and each shard can have one or more replica. By default, an index is created with 5 shards and 1 replica per shard (5/1). There are many topologies that can be used, including 1/10 (improve search performance), or 20/1 (improve indexing performance, with search executed in a map reduce fashion across shards).

Elasticsearch is API driven. Almost any action can be peformed using a simple RESTful API using JSON over HTTP.

Features include:

• Distributed and highly available search engine
• Replicas are near real-time
• Each index is fully sharded with a configurable number of shards
• Each shard can have one or more replicas
• Read / Search operations performed on either one of the replica shard
• Multi tenant with multi types
• Support for more than one index
• Support for more than one type per index
• Index level configuration (number of shards, index storage, ...)
• Various set of APIs
• HTTP RESTful API
• Native Java API
• All APIs perform automatic node operation rerouting
• Document oriented
• No need for upfront schema definition
• Schema can be defined per type for customization of the indexing process
• Reliable, Asynchronous Write Behind for long term persistency
• Fully supports the near real time search of Apache Lucene. Search comes with multi-language support, a powerful query language, support for geolocation, context aware did-you-mean suggestions, autocomplete and search snippets
• Built on top of Lucene
• Each shard is a fully functional Lucene index
• All the power of Lucene easily exposed through simple configuration / plugins
• Per operation consistency
• Gateway, which handles the long term persistence of the index. This makes full backups easier
• Supports real-time GET requests, which makes it suitable as a NoSQL solution,
• Single document level operations are atomic, consistent, isolated and durable
• Store complex real world entities in Elasticsearch as structured JSON documents.  All fields are indexed by default, and all the indices can be used in a single query, to return results at breath taking speed

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Last Updated Wednesday, April 03 2013 @ 07:06 AM EST