I have a fast growing database and I'm using Elastic Search to manage it.it has only one index and gets 200 K new documents per day. each document contains of about 5 KB text.
Should I keep using only one index or it's better to have one index for each day or something else?
If so, what's the benefits of having multiple indices?
You should definitely worry about the maximum size of your shards/index. We use daily indexes for stuff where we are inserting millions of records per day and monthly indexes where were are inserting millions per month.
A good rule of thumb is that shards should max out around 4 GB (remember there are a configurable number of shards per index).
The advantage is that when you have daily/weekly/monthly indexes, you can eventually close/delete them when your cluster becomes too big or the data isn't useful anymore. If your data is time series data, you can craft your queries to only hit the indexes that are used for the given data. Also if you've made a mistake in how many shards you really need, you can correct it going forward (because you create a new index periodically).
The disadvantage is then that you have to manage all of the extra indexes, but there are tools to do that (elasticsearch-curator for example).
Related
I am planning to use Elasticsearch to store user orders data. There could be 20 million orders per year in my system. 20 million orders probably take about 10GB size.
My question is whether I should create one index to include all orders' data. I have read ES doc saying we'd better keep 20GB data in one primary shard. If I create one index with 5 primary shards, does it mean I am fine to save 100GB (200 millions) orders in this index?
Another approach is to create index per year, for example, I create index order-2020, order-2021, order-2022 etc. And I can create less primary shard for each index. I understand using this pattern may benefit if I want to add a retention period on my order data. But apart from that, what other benefits I can have to use this pattern?
From query performance perspective, which approach is better?
In terms of search speed and aggregation accuracy, multi-index multi-fragment will inevitably have some loss, but in terms of data health, it is recommended to split the data by year, you can use alias to establish index association, and the loss in query performance is much less than that in aggregation.
I am currently playing around with Elasticsearch (ES). We are ingesting sensor data and for 3 years we have approximately 1,000,000,000 documents in one index, making the index about 50GB in size. Indexing performance is not that important as new data only arrives every 15 minutes per sensor on average, therefore I want to focus on searching and aggregating performance. We are running a front-end showing basically a dashboard about average values from last week compared to one year before etc.
I am using ES on AWS and after performance on one machine was quite slow, I spun up a cluster with 3 data nodes (each 2 cores, 8 GB mem), and gave the index 3 primary shards and one replica. Throwing computing power at the data certainly improved the situation and more power would help more, but my question is:
Would splitting the index for example by month increase the performance? Or being more specific: is querying (esp. by date) a smaller index faster if I adjust the queries adequatly, or does ES already 'know' where to find specific dates in a shard?
(I know about other benefits of having smaller indices, like being able to roll over and keep only a specific time interval, etc.)
1/ Elasticsearch only knows where to find a specific date in an index if your index is sorted by your date field. You can check the documentation here.
In your use case, it can improve drastically search performance. And since all the data will be added at the "end of the index" since its date sorted, you should not see much of indexation overhead.
2/ Without index sort, smaller time-bounded indices will work better (even if you target all your indices) since it will often allow a rewrite or your range query to a match_all / match_none internal query.
For more information about this behavior you should read this blog post :
Instant Aggregations: Rewriting Queries for Fun and Profit
index created for multiple table from a database. Over a period of time record of a couple of table increased and a couple of table has millions of record. but initially it has hundreds of record. So if count of records are increased, how do make better performance.
1) do we need to move the table from old index to newly creating index
or
2) increase the nodes and shards of existing index, thus make better performance.
so i am looking better solution and pls let me know, if my requirement is not clear.
Could anybody answer please.
It sounds like perhaps you should consider using timeseries-based indices, so
you would create an index for every day or month (or whatever time period you
wanted) and then you could use a tool like
curator to manage them. This way you have
more flexibility with what to do with older indices, like closing them, deleting
them, or force-merging them using the optimize API.
If you already have performance issues, it's going to be harder. Since the number of shards is fixed at index creation time, you will have to reindex the data to a new index with more shards.
If you have tables that grow indefinitely (e.g. logs) plan ahead with time-based indexes. If your data is not time-based you can do the same trick. Use templates to automatically create indexes and aliases so you can query them as it would be one index.
There is no golden rule here, but once you know that for example how your index scales for your usecase for 1M records you can do some automatic indexing by id from your primary storage (db). All you have to do is, when indexing pick the right index to write to (since you can't use alias for indexing), querying is transparent through alias. This is a minor change for most apps.
Let's say I have 100,000 documents from different customer groups, which are formatted the same with the same type of information.
Documents from individual customer groups get refreshed at different times of the day. I've been recommended to give each customer group their own index so when my individual customer index is refreshed locally I can create a new index for that customer and delete the old index for that customer.
What are the implications for splitting the data into multiple indexes and querying using an alias? Specifically:
Will it increase my server HDD requirements?
Will it increase my server RAM requirements?
Will elasticsearch be slower to search by querying the alias to query all the indexes?
Thank you for any help or advice.
Every index has some overhead on all levels but it's usually small. For 100,000 documents I would question the need for splitting unless these documents are very large. In general each added index will:
Require some amount of RAM for insert buffers and other per-index related tasks
Have it's own merge overhead on disk relative to a larger single index
Provide some latency increase at query time due to result merging if a query spans multiple indexes
There are a lot of factors that go into determining if any of these are significant. If you have lots of RAM and several CPUs and SSDs then you may be fine.
I would advise you to build a solution that uses the minimum number of shards as possible. That probably means one (or at least only a few) index(es).
ElasticSearch Community:
Suppose I have a customer named Twetter who has hired me today to build out their search capability for a 181 word social media site.
Assume I cannot predict the number of shards I will need for future scaling and the storage size is already in tens of terabytes.
Assume I do not need to edit any documents once they are indexed. This is strictly for searching.
Referencing the image above, there seems to be some documents which point to 'rolling indexes' ref1 ref2 ref3 whereby I may create a single index (ea. index named tweets1 -> N) on-the-fly. When one index fills up, I can simply add a new machine, with a new index, and add it to the same cluster and alias for searching.
Does this architecture hold water in production?
Are there any long term ramifications to this 'rolling index' architecture as opposed to predicting a shard count and scaling within that estimate?
A shard in elasticsearch is just a lucene index. An elasticsearch index is just a collection of lucene indices (shards). Given that, for capacity planning in your situation you simply need to figure out how many documents you can store in an index with only one shard and still get the query performance you want.
It is the underlying lucene indices that use up resources. Based on how your documents are indexed within the lucene indices, there is a finite number of shards that any single node in your cluster will be able to handle. You can always scale by adding more nodes to the cluster. Just monitor resource usage and query response times to know when to add more nodes.
It is perfectly reasonable to create indices named tweet_1, tweet_2, tweet_3, etc. rolling forward instead of worrying about resharding your data. It accomplishes the same thing in the end. Just use an index alias to hide the numbers.
Once you figure out how many documents you can store per shard to get your query performance, then decide how many shards per index you want to have and then multiply those numbers and cap the index at that number of documents in your code. Once you reach the cap you just roll over to a new index. Here is what I do in my code to determine which index to send a document to (I have sequential ids):
$index = 'file_' . (int)($fid / $docsPerIndex);
Note that I am using index templates so it can automatically create a new index without me having to manually roll over when the cap is reached.
One other consideration is what type of queries you will be performing. As the data grows you have two options for scaling.
You need to have enough nodes in your cluster for parallelizing the query that it can easily search across all indices and still respond quickly.
or
You need to name your indices such that you know which to query and only need to query a subset of the indices in the cluster.
Keep in mind that if you have sequential or predictable ids then elasticsearch can perform id based queries efficiently without actually having to query the whole cluster. If you let ES automatically assign ids (assuming you are using ES >=1.4.0) it will use predictable ids (flake ids) already. This also speeds up indexing. Random ids create a worst case scenario.
If your queries are going to be time based then it will have to search the entire set of indices for each query under this scheme. For time based queries you want to roll your indices over based on some amount of time (e.g. each day or month depending on how much data you receive in that time frame) and name them something like tweets_2015_01, tweets_2015_02, etc. By doing so you can narrow the set of indices you have to search at query time based on the requested search time range.