Book Image

Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x - Third Edition

Book Image

Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Elasticsearch is a modern, fast, distributed, scalable, fault tolerant, and open source search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch leverages the capabilities of Apache Lucene, and provides a new level of control over how you can index and search even huge sets of data. This book will give you a brief recap of the basics and also introduce you to the new features of Elasticsearch 5. We will guide you through the intermediate and advanced functionalities of Elasticsearch, such as querying, indexing, searching, and modifying data. We’ll also explore advanced concepts, including aggregation, index control, sharding, replication, and clustering. We’ll show you the modules of monitoring and administration available in Elasticsearch, and will also cover backup and recovery. You will get an understanding of how you can scale your Elasticsearch cluster to contextualize it and improve its performance. We’ll also show you how you can create your own analysis plugin in Elasticsearch. By the end of the book, you will have all the knowledge necessary to master Elasticsearch and put it to efficient use.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x - Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Query execution preference


Let's forget about the shard placement and how to configure it--at least for a moment. In addition to all the fancy stuff that Elasticsearch allows us to set for shards and replicas, we also have the possibility to specify where our queries (and other operations, for example, the real-time GET) should be executed.

Introducing the preference parameter

In order to control where the query (and other operations) we are sending will be executed, we can use the preference parameter, which can be set to one of the following values:

  • _primary: Using this property, the operations we are sending will only be executed on primary shards. So, if we send a query against the mastering index with the preference parameter set to the _primary value, we would have it executed on the nodes with the names node1 and node2. For example, if you know that your primary shards are in one rack and the replicas are in other racks, you may want to execute the operation on primary shards to avoid...