ES: How do quasi-join queries using global aggregation compare to parent-child / nested queries? - performance

Question

At my work, I came across the following pattern for doing quasi-joins in Elasticsearch. I wonder whether this is a good idea, performance-wise.
The pattern:
Connects docs in one index in one-to-many relationship.
Somewhat like ES parent-child, but implemented without it.
Child docs need to be indexed with a field called e.g. "my_parent_id", with value being the parent ID.
Can be used when querying for parent, knowing its ID in advance, to also get the children in the same query.
The query with quasi-join (assume 123 is parent ID):
GET /my-index/_search
{
"query": {
"bool": {
"must": [
{
"term": {
"id": {
"value": 123
}
}
}
]
}
},
"aggs": {
"my-global-agg" : {
"global" : {},
"aggs" : {
"my-filtering-all-but-children": {
"filter": {
"term": {
"my_parent_id": 123
}
},
"aggs": {
"my-returning-children": {
"top_hits": {
"_source": {
"includes": [
"my_child_field1_to_return",
"my_child_field2_to_return"
]
},
"size": 1000
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
This query returns:
the parent (as search query result), and
its children (as the aggregation result).
Performance-wise, is the above:
definitively a good idea,
definitively a bad idea,
hard to tell / it depends?

Answer 1

It depends ;-) The idea is good, however, by default the maximum number of hits you can return in a top_hits aggregation is 100, if you try 1000 you'll get an error like this:
Top hits result window is too large, the top hits aggregator [hits]'s from + size must be less than or equal to: [100] but was [1000]. This limit can be set by changing the [index.max_inner_result_window] index level setting.
As the error states, you can increase this limit by changing the index.max_inner_result_window index setting. But, if there's a default, there's usually a good reason. I would take that as a hint that it might not be that great an idea to increase it too much.
So, if your parent documents have less than 100 children, why not, otherwise I'd seriously consider going another approach.