What is ES|QL?

ES|QL is a new query language and a query engine introduced by Elastic, designed to enhance the way users interact with their data. As data volumes grow and the complexity of analysis increases, traditional query languages have begun to show their limitations. ES|QL was developed to address these challenges and provide a more efficient, user-friendly experience for a diverse range of users, from beginners to seasoned experts.To be clear, ES|QL has been designed to reduce the distance between Elasticsearch users and insights. Not only for analytics, but for everything users can do with Elasticsearch, such as log analytics, to metrics analytics, threat hunting for cybersecurity, and simple to complex search queries. It should not be hard for anyone to query the data.There are other ways to solve this challenge, but a combination of intuitive functions that have been used for decades in SQL-like query languages and chains of expression separated by pipes has been proven to be a straightforward way to build insight on data. ES|QL is a natural way to build queries and get insights iteratively, from simple to complex, and ensure correctness along the way. Not only that, but you will see in subsequent chapters that ES|QL is not only a language running on top of Elasticsearch, it is also a processing layer that scales. At Elastic, we do not compromise with scale; ES|QL has followed the same paradigm. Lastly, the introduction of ES|QL gave us an opportunity to build a new query engine with better performance output.