The Advantages of Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a powerful tool that helps you search through large amounts of data very quickly. In this Tech in 2, Principal Consultant Todd Schmitt shares how it works and how you can use it to bring efficiency to your organization.

Elasticsearch allows you to search through the text of different documents. So, a database might be used more for searching field by field, but Elasticsearch is made specifically for text. With databases, usually, to store things properly, you have to know ahead of time what kind of data you’re interested in. But with something like Elasticsearch, because you can collect so much more data, you can kind of throw it all in and then do analytics on it later. It basically allows you to search through things the same way that Google or a search engine would. It allows you to look through books, tweets, or other large sources of text, looking for information. What that does is it means that a lot of information is now put together in one spot, making it faster to retrieve.

I think what probably excites me the most is the fact that you can get so much data in a short amount of time, and that it’s ranked. Because when you have to search through a lot of data, like when you’re searching through a database, you’re often just getting a lot of results that meet your criteria. But the hope with Elasticsearch is that you’re getting the best record you have from a very large group of data. So, by using Elasticsearch or similar tools, you can bring a lot of efficiency into the organization because you’re using a lot of math that smart people have already put together for you. You can just make use of these tools to get something really powerful with relatively little effort on your developer’s part.