Using explicit mapping makes it possible to be faster in starting to ingest the data using a schema-less approach without being concerned about field types. Thus, to achieve better results and performance in indexing, it's required to manually define a mapping.
Fine-tuning mapping brings some advantages, such as the following:
- 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 you to use base fields with a wide range of configurations.
