Preface

The world is swimming in data. For years we have been simply overwhelmed by the quantity of data flowing through and produced by our systems. Existing technology has focused on how to store and structure warehouses full of data. That’s all well and good—​until you actually need to make decisions in real time informed by that data.

Elasticsearch is a distributed, scalable, real-time search and analytics engine. It enables you to search, analyze, and explore your data, often in ways that you did not anticipate at the start of a project. It exists because raw data sitting on a hard drive is just not useful.

Whether you need full-text search, real-time analytics of structured data, or a combination of the two, this book introduces you to the fundamental concepts required to start working with Elasticsearch at a basic level. With these foundations laid, it will move on to more-advanced search techniques, which you will need to shape the search experience to fit your requirements.

Elasticsearch is not just about full-text search. We explain structured search, analytics, the complexities of dealing with human language, geolocation, and relationships. We will also discuss how best to model your data to take advantage of the horizontal scalability of Elasticsearch, and how to configure and monitor your cluster when moving to production.