WHAT IS ELASTIC SEARCH AND WHY YOU SHOULD BE USING IT      

When a customer searches for a product, he/she is expecting an instant answer. They are looking for the reason that’ll influence a decision to buy or not.  It’s usually frustrating to wait for long hours before getting important product information. This is why many organizations lose potential customers and clients. If your company can’t boast of good user experience for potential customers who search for its products, you can’t be surprised that your competitors are garnering more patronage than you. This is why it’s a huge error to depend on a relational database. This type of database does not improve user experience due to the ways by which data is stored and the slow speed at which data is retrieved. On a relational database, data are stored on multiple tables. This method of storage delays the retrieval of important information for users when they need it.

This is why many organizations whose products involve search engines are migrating to engines that ensure good user experience when it comes to the retrieval of information.  So, if your business operates with a huge amount of data that customers must search to find the information they need, it’s best to get a data-storing engine that enhances quicker retrieval such as Elasticsearch.

 What is Elasticsearch?

This is a full-text search engine that allows for storing, analyzing, and retrieval of large data in the shortest time possible. The speed at which Elasticsearch operates makes it highly suitable for applications that feature complex requirements and search features. Elasticsearch software is both licensed as an open-source license and source-available license. It is developed in java and offers a distributed system. It uses a REST API, which is based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). The software also offers a distributed system on top of Lucene StandardAnalyzer that enables indexing & automatic type-guessing.

One of the good points of Elasticsearch is that the setup is easy. It comes with impressive defaults and also encourages user-experience as beginners can set it up without difficulties. It uses some defaults in the data indexing and doesn’t have a fixed data structure. This means that by mastering the basics, a beginner can change the available data structure and set up the software.

Why Elasticsearch?

The reason for the rise in recognition and application of elasticsearch is that it allows users to store data in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). Then send a query to retrieve the data. Moreover, every Elasticsearch feature appears as a REST API. For instance, there is

• Index application program interface (API) for documenting the index
• Get API retrieves the document
• Search application program interface submits the query and retrieves the result
• Put Mapping API overrides the default and defines the mapping.

Concepts of Elasticsearch 

Some of the important concepts of this software which you must know include the following:

• Index

Documents that have the same characteristics are called index. For example, a business may have an index for their product information, another for a particular customer, or different data types and identify them with a unique name when carrying out an indexing search or when deleting operations or updating the database. A user can define many indexes in one single cluster, and that’s one of the components of Elasticsearch.

• Cluster

This software works with a cross-cluster replication and sometimes uses a secondary cluster as a backup. It holds all your data in a cluster and offers federated indexing & search capabilities.

• Document

The unit of information in which Elasticsearch indexes is called a document. It expresses the document in JSON, which is a data-interchange format found everywhere on the internet.

• Shards

This is the subset of documents of a particular index. One index can be divided into multiple shards. This is one of the capabilities available in Elasticsearch. You can subdivide an index into many pieces known as shards.

• Mapping Type

This software uses a database table in

When to use Elasticsearch