Using explicit mapping allows to be faster in starting to insert the data using a schema less approach without being concerned of the field types, so as to achieve better results and performance in indexing, it's required to manually define a mapping.
Fine-tuning mapping brings some advantages such as:
Reducing the index size on the disk (disabling functionalities for custom fields)
Indexing only interesting fields (general speed up)
Precooking data for fast search or real-time analytics (such as facets)
Correctly defining whether a field must be analyzed in multiple tokens or considered as a single token
Elasticsearch allows using base fields with a wide range of configurations.
You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.
To execute curl via the command line, you need to install curl for your operative system.
To execute this recipe's examples, you...