What is the difference between source filtering, stored fields, and doc values in elsaticsearch? - elasticsearch

Question

I've read the docs for source filtering, stored fields, and doc values.
In certain situations it can make sense to store a field. For instance, if you have a document with a title, a date, and a very large content field, you may want to retrieve just the title and the date without having to extract those fields from a large _source field
The stored_fields parameter is about fields that are explicitly marked as stored in the mapping, which is off by default and generally not recommended. Use source filtering instead to select subsets of the original source document to be returned.
All fields which support doc values have them enabled by default.
Example 1
I have documents with title (short string), and content (>1MB). I want to search for matching titles, and return the title.
With source filtering
GET /_search
{ _source: "obj.title", ... }
With stored fields
GET /_search
{ _source: false, stored_fields: ["title"], ... }
With doc values
GET /_search
{_source: false, stored_fields: "_none_", docvalue_fields: "title", ... }
Okay, so
Will the source filtered request read the full _source, title and content, from disk then apply the filter and return only the title, or will elasticsearch only read the title from disk?
Will the source filtered reques use doc values?
Do stored fields store the analyzed tokens or the original value?
Are stored fields or doc values more or less efficient than _source?

Answer 1

Will the source filtered request read the full _source, title and content, from disk then apply the filter and return only the title, or will elasticsearch only read the title from disk?
The document you send for indexing to Elasticsearch will be stored in a field called _source (by default). So this means that if your document contains a large amount of data (like in the content field in your case), the full content will be stored in the _source field. When using source filtering, first the whole source document must be retrieved from the _source field and then only the title field will be returned. You're wasting space because nothing really happens with the content field, since you're searching on title and returning only the title value.
In your case, you'd be better off to not store the _source document, and only store the title field (but it has some disadvantages, too, so read this before you do), basically like this:
PUT index
{
"mappings": {
"_source": {
"enabled": false
},
"properties": {
"title": {
"type": "text",
"store": true
},
"content": {
"type": "text"
}
}
}
}
Will the source filtered request use doc values?
doc-values are enabled by default on all fields, except on analyzed text fields. If you use _source filtering, it's not using doc values, as explained above, the _source field is retrieved and the fields you specified are filtered.
Do stored fields store the analyzed tokens or the original value?
Stored fields store the exact value as present in the _source document
Are stored fields or doc values more or less efficient than _source?
doc_values is a different beast, it's more of a optimization to store the tokens of non-analyzed fields in a way to will make it easy to sort, filter and aggregate on those values.
Stored fields (default is false) are also an optimization if you don't want to store the full source but only a few important fields (as explained above).
The _source field itself is a stored field that contains the whole document.