This Week in Elasticsearch - March 05, 2014

Welcome to This Week in Elasticsearch. In this roundup, we try to inform you about the latest and greatest changes in Elasticsearch. We cover what happened in the GitHub repositories, as well as many Elasticsearch events happening worldwide, and give you a small peek into the future of the project.

Elasticsearch core

• Upgrade to Lucene 4.7 closing numerous outstanding bugs (commit, master, 1.x)
• Aggregagtions now support percentiles (#5323, master, 1.x)
• The master branch now allows for java 1.7 (#5267, master)
• Use FieldMapper to create the low level term queries in CommonTermQuery (#5258, master, 1.x, 1.0 and 0.90)
• Add tracking of allocated arrays to make sure they are released (#5264, master, 1.x)
• Make reuse of allocated pages more aggressive (#5299, master, 1.x)
• Add explain flag support to the reroute API to get useful explanations (#2483, master, 1.x)
• Shingle filter now exposes filter_token (#4307, master, 1.x)
• Improved arc geo-distance accuracy (#5192, master, 1.x)
• Plugins can now have an isolated class loader (#5261, master, 1.x)
• Terms Aggregation: Use ordinals only on low-cardinality fields by default (#5303, master, 1.x)
• Terms Aggregation: Fix sorting of NaN values in terms aggregations (#5236, master, 1.x, 1.0)
• Aggregations: Fix Exception when building a bucket which has not been collected (#5048, master, 1.x, 1.0)
• Made BytesStreamOutput more efficient by using BigArrays and ByteArray classes (#5159, master, 1.x)
• Field data: Using the ciruit breaker could result in NullPointerException (#5326, master, 1.x, 1.0)
• Field data: Add circuit breaker for parent/child id cache (#5325, master, 1.x)

Elasticsearch Ecosystem

Here's some more information about what is happening in the ecosystem we are maintaining around Elasticsearch, including plugin and driver releases, and news about Logstash and Kibana.

• Logstash 1.4.0 beta 2 has been released.
• Updates for various officially supported plugins: elasticsearch-analysis-stempel, elasticsearch-analysis-smartcn, elasticsearch-analysis-phonetic, elasticsearch-analysis-icu, elasticsearch-analysis-kuromoji, elasticsearch-river-couchdb, elasticsearch-river-wikipedia, elasticsearch-transport-thrift, elasticsearch-transport-memcached
• The first version of the elasticsearch-rails gem has been released
• Ananda Verma authored a tutorial on Building a Log Analysis system using Logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana-Single Node Setup.
• Sony Arouje shared a tutorial for Indexing and Searching with Elasticsearch with .NET.
• Ryan Robitalle wrote an article on How to Query Elasticsearch with Hive SQL and Hadoop.
• Tim de Pater shared his experiences Using Logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana to track his spending habits.
• Rotem Hermon treated us to a deep dive on Securing Elasticsearch with Finagle.
• Roman Valls wrote an article on using the ELK stack, which he calls the best open source dashboard. We think it's pretty cool, too, Roman. :)
• Chris Sprehe authored a post on GeoHash Grid Aggregation with Elasticsearch.
• Arkadiy Zabazhanov wrote up An Introduction to Chewy for folks using Elasticsearch for Ruby on Rails.
• Michael Lussier authored an Introduction to Elasticsearch Percolate.
• The folks Artirix shared a post on using Elasticsearch as a smart cache.
• The folks at Wattpad Engineering authored an article on Using Nginx as a proxy for Elasticsearch.

Slides & Videos

Honza Kral on Elasticsearch 1.0 at last week's Rubyslava Conference

Jim Nesbit from Loggly on Infrastructure at Scale: Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm & Elasticsearch - Most Watched Presentation from AWS re:Invent

• The Elasticsearch Bucharest held their first ever meetup last week. Check out the presentation on Introduction to Elasticsearch.
• The Istanbul Coders meetup group covered Elasticsearch: Distributed Search and Analytics at last week's meetup.
• David Pilato's talk at MS Tech days is online as a video (in french)

Roy Russo's Introduction to Elasticsearch from DevNexus Atlanta 2014

Where to find Us

We'd love to feature all the great Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana presentations and meetups happening worldwide in this section. If you're speaking or hosting a meetup, let our Community Manager, Leslie Hawthorn, know!

Australia

Britta Weber and Lee Hinman will head Down Under to teach training courses in Melbourne and Sydney. On March 13th you can join us for the Melbourne Meetup, or come by the Sydney Meetup on March 17th.

Austria

Karel Minařík will speak at the Ruby User Group Linz on March 12th.

Canada

• Steve Mayzak will present on Elasticsearch in the Real World plus What's New in 1.0 at the upcoming Polyglot Vancouver Meetup. The meetup will take place on March 5th starting at 6 PM.
• The Elasticsearch Montreal Meetup group has scheduled their first meeting for March 12th at 7 PM.
• Honza Kral will be attending PyCon North America and the accompanying Django sprints. Make sure to stop by and hear more from him during his poster session Collect and Analyze your logs with Logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Czech Republic

Karel Minařík will be speaking at the Prague.rb user group on March 5th. Doors open at 7 PM.

France

David Pilato will be speaking on the ELK stack - that's Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana - and Elasticsearch Marvel on March 13th in Paris. The talks are free of charge but registration is required.

Germany

• Shay Banon will be on center stage at CeBIT 2014 on March 14th, discussing the impact of data harvesting on tomorrow's business insights. CeBIT runs March 10-14th in Hannover.
• Alexander Reelsen and Luca Cavanna will share the stage at GOTO Berlin night on March 18th. They'll be talking all about Elasticsearch 1.0 and how to use the ELK stack (that's Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana) to create real-time dashboards. Doors open at 7 PM and registration is required via the GOTO Berlin site.
• Alexander Reelsen will be attending DevCamp Karlsruhe on March 21-23rd. Say hello when you pass him in the hallway track.
• The first ever Stuttgart Elasticsearch Meetup will take place on March 25th at 7 PM. Alexander Reelsen will be covering What's New in Elasticsearch 1.0.
• Patrick Peschlow will talk about talk about Elasticsearch and his experiences at JavaLand 2014. His presentation is scheduled for March 25th in Brühl.
• Alexander Reelsen will be at the Berlin Expert Days Conference (BED-Con) on April 3rd and 4th. He will present Creating realtime dashboards using Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.
• Jordan Sissel will speak at the Open Source Data Center Conference in Berlin, discussing how to Find Happiness in Your Logs. The conference will run from April 8-10th.

Italy

David Pilato will present Make sense of your (BIG) data! at the Italian Cloud Conference The conference takes place in Torino on April 3rd, and David will speak at 10:30 AM.

Japan

The 4th Elasticsearch study session has been scheduled by Jun Ohtani. Please plan to join the meeting at 7 PM on April 21st.

The Netherlands

Boaz Leskes and Luca Cavanna will be attending the Joy of Coding Conference this Friday in Rotterdam. Say hello to them in the hallways!

South Africa

Clinton Gormley will take the stage at ScaleConf to talk Scaling real time search and analytics with Elasticsearch. The conference runs April 10th and 11th in Cape Town.

United Kingdom

• Shay Banon and Graham Tackley from The Guardian will share the stage at QCon London, discussing How Elasticsearch Powers The Guardian's Newsroom. Several folks from the Elasticsearch team will also be on hand in Booth 12 to answer questions. Stop by and say hello! QCon runs March 3-7th.
• The Enterprise Search Cambridge UK Meetup will feature a presentation on how Rangespan uses Elasticsearch. The meetup convenes on March 5th and doors open at 7 PM

United States

• Safe and sound following the recent Portlandia Snowpocalypse, Steve Mayzak's presentation to the Seattle Search and Machine Learning meetup group has been rescheduled for March 6th. Please join Steve starting at 7 PM to hear all about Elasticsearch 1.0.
• Elasticsearch is proud to be a technology partner for Slashathon, a hackfest to create applications to connect musicians with their fans. Aaron Mildenstein will be on hand to answer any questions folks have about integrating Elasticsearch into their applications.
• The Philadelphia Elasticsearch Meetup group has just been set up, and the organizers are figuring out the first meeting date. Join the meetup group to get regular updates.

Where to Find You

Our Community Manager, Leslie Hawthorn, is hard at work to help folks create more Elasticsearch meetup groups and to help meetup organizers find more speakers. If you are interested in either effort, take a moment to let her know.

Oh yeah, we're also hiring. If you'd like us to find you for employment purposes, just drop us a note.  We care more about your skill set and passion for Elasticearch, Kibana and Logstash than where you rest your head.

Trainings

If you are interested in Elasticsearch training we have courses taught by our core developers coming up in:

• Sydney - March 17, 2014 (core Elasticsearch training)
• San Francisco - March 24, 2014 (one day ELK workshop)
• Amsterdam - April 08, 2014 (core Elasticsearch training)
• Austin - April 09, 2014 (core Elasticsearch training)
• New York - April 23, 2014 (core Elasticsearch training)
• London - April 29, 2014 (core Elasticsearch training)