Finally, after more than a year of hiatus, I start writing again on this blog! This time, I’ll write about Effective Elasticsearch Mapping, i.e. some tips on how to define our mapping in Elasticsearch 1.7.x. We just started using Elasticsearch 2.0 in LARC (my current workplace :)), so I’ll do my best to update this list accordingly as we grow our experience in Elasticsearch 2.0.
1. Use appropriate data type for an ES field
Elasticsearch will try its best to determine the data type of an unknown field when we index a document. However, it’s better to use appropriate data type for ES field, hence define your mapping early (i.e. before you start to index the documents) and use index template1.
Some of the data types that you should use:
date
type for timestamp.
Don’t uselong
orstring
type although they may look promising. Usingdate
type allow us to use the index easily in Kibana and support time-aggregation without the needs of scanning.-
geo_point
type for geo location (i.e. latitude-longitude) Continue reading Effective Elasticsearch Mapping