Navigating This Book

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This book is divided into seven parts:

  • Chapters You Know, for Search…​ through Inside a Shard provide an introduction to Elasticsearch. They explain how to get your data in and out of Elasticsearch, how Elasticsearch interprets the data in your documents, how basic search works, and how to manage indices. By the end of this section, you will already be able to integrate your application with Elasticsearch. Chapters Life Inside a Cluster, Distributed Document Store, Distributed Search Execution, and Inside a Shard are supplemental chapters that provide more insight into the distributed processes at work, but are not required reading.
  • Chapters Structured Search through Controlling Relevance offer a deep dive into search—​how to index and query your data to allow you to take advantage of more-advanced concepts such as word proximity, and partial matching. You will understand how relevance works and how to control it to ensure that the best results are on the first page.
  • Chapters Getting Started with Languages through Typoes and Mispelings tackle the thorny subject of dealing with human language through effective use of analyzers and queries. We start with an easy approach to language analysis before diving into the complexities of language, alphabets, and sorting. We cover stemming, stopwords, synonyms, and fuzzy matching.
  • Chapters High-Level Concepts through Doc Values and Fielddata discuss aggregations and analytics—​ways to summarize and group your data to show overall trends.
  • Chapters Geo Points through Geo Shapes present the two approaches to geolocation supported by Elasticsearch: lat/lon geo-points, and complex geo-shapes.
  • Chapters Handling Relationships through Designing for Scale talk about how to model your data to work most efficiently with Elasticsearch. Representing relationships between entities is not as easy in a search engine as it is in a relational database, which has been designed for that purpose. These chapters also explain how to suit your index design to match the flow of data through your system.
  • Finally, Chapters Monitoring through Post-Deployment discuss moving to production: the important configurations, what to monitor, and how to diagnose and prevent problems.