CODEWITHSUNDEEP
postgresqlelasticsearch
Yaron Naveh
Yaron Naveh

Reputation: 24436

should I use elasticsearch for non-free-text searches

I use Postgres as a data warehouse. I need to do free text search on many of the fields. My DBA recommends not to use Postgres for free text searches. I am now considering elasticsearch. The question is what to do if the user filters both by free text and some structured dimension. Should I query both elastic and postgres and take the intersection, or can I serve all query from elastic? What if there are no free text in the filter - is elastic appropriate for my general purpose querying?

EDIT: as requested some more information. database will contain a few million rows. I cannot give concrete details about data except that a row will contain ~30 columns, half of them are strings, between one word and a few sentences. The reasons to use elastic are not just the DBAs objection to full text index in postgres, but elastic also gives results ranking and specific text search semantics.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2074

Answers (1)

javanna
javanna

Reputation: 60245

It is true that elasticsearch is great for full-text search, since it uses lucene under the covers, but it's also very good for structured search through filters. One other great thing that you can do with it is data analytics, that allows to visualize aggregations of your data.

That said, you don't necessarily need full-text search requirements in order to make good use of elasticsearch. There are many usecases where elasticsearch is used only for one of those three aspects that I mentioned: full-text search, structured search or data analytics. The next step is also to combine those together.

Your usecase is quite common and I would suggest to go ahead and consider running structured queries too against elasticsearch instead of querying two systems. The only obstacle that I can foresee could be document relations, that need to be properly represented and handled within elasticsearch.

Have a look at the elasticsearch query DSL, used to represent queries, and effectively combine structured and unstructured search together.

Upvotes: 3

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