This document discusses Elasticsearch and why it is useful for full text search. It notes that hand-rolling search is complex and can have performance issues on large datasets. Elasticsearch allows for straightforward installation and horizontal scaling. It brings full text search capabilities to applications without requiring additional database strain.

1. http://omarqureshi.net
@omarqureshi
Elasticsearch
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2. why should you
care?
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3. search is important
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4. hand-rolling is
unnecessarily
complex
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5. complex queries
select *
from movies
where :q = any(string_to_array(title, ‘’))
or :q = any(string_to_array(plot, ‘’));
multiple word search? ordering?
indexing (performance)?
nearest matches?
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6. better with built-in full
text search
select *,
ts_rank_cd(tsv, :q, 32) as rank
from movies
where tsv @@ :q
order by rank desc;
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7. performance
degradation on
non-trivial data sets
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8. read (and write)
strain on the
database
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9. elasticsearch
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10. The non-search
bits of
elasticsearch
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11. Straightforward install
URL='https://download.elasticsearch.org/
elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.90.1.deb'
FILE=`mktemp`
wget "$URL" -qO $FILE && sudo dpkg -i $FILE
rm $FILE
RPM packages also available
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12. scales horizontally,
easily!
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13. rebalancing of shards
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14. no ZooKeeper
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15. split-brain
avoidance
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16. multicast node
discovery
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17. query any node
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18. HTTP returning
JSON
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19. rebalance demo
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20. karmi/tire
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21. see Railscasts
306 and 307
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22. example app
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23. questions?
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