This Week in Elasticsearch - August 07, 2013

Welcome to the sixth issue of This week in elasticsearch. In this format we try to inform you about the latest and greatest changes in elasticsearch. We try to cover what happened in the github repositories, as well as all the events happening about elasticsearch and give you a small peek in the future.

Elasticsearch core

  • Yesterday elasticsearch 0.90.3 was released, featuring a new completion suggester, improved cluster stability and tons of bugfixes.
  • Function scoring has landed in master. Internally, this unifies the handling of custom_boost_factor, custom_score and custom_filters_score queries. For the user, it gives the ability to score depending on the distance of a numeric field value from a user-given reference, allowing distance based scoring or time based scoring for example. This is a powerful feature, so be sure to check out the documentation (#3423, master only at the moment, will be ported to 0.90 soon)
  • The amount of sent cluster state events is reduced on shard rerouting as well as eager rerouting as events have been queued before already (#3417, master and 0.90)
  • Query/Filter facets now have a 64 bit counter (#3419, master and 0.90)
  • A new experimental prefix suggest mechanism has been added. This uses a slightly modified AnalyzingSuggester from Lucene which does not rely on creating in-memory FSTs on a regular interval, but acts near real-time. (#3376, master and 0.90)
  • Searching on an almost completely relocated shard, while its status is being flipped could have failed (#3427, master and 0.90)
  • The bin/plugin command now takes an argument to specify a custom configuration path, which is important if the elasticsearch configuration file is not placed in the elasticsearch directory, for example in a packaged environment (#3304, master and 0.90)
  • The new percolation API now supports counting only (#3430, master only)
  • The java client highlighting API is now similar to the REST API (#3435, master and 0.90)
  • Support for named filters in the top-level filter has been added (#3097, master and 0.90)
  • REST support for handling index templates has been improved (proper GET and HEAD) (#3434, master and 0.90)
  • The PID file is now completely overwritten startup, before it might have mixed up two pids of different lengths. Note: a former pid file should only exist if the JVM which created it either exited abnormal or you are trying to use the same pid file for multiple instances.(#3425, master and 0.90)
  • Search and broadcast related responses now use the same logic to indicate failures (#3441, master and 0.90)
  • Size and time values need to be explicitely enabled if they should be returned in human readable format, i.e. 1m 17 seconds (#3432, master only)
  • Highlighting support for suggestions has been added (#3442, master and 0.90)
  • A NPE during bulk updates in combination with retry_on_conflict has been fixed (#3448, master and 0.90)
  • Filtering by parent has been improved (#3454, master and 0.90)
  • Improved error message when a mapping document is malformed (#3449, master and 0.90)
  • More-Like-This now correctly returns no documents if fields are not supported by MLT (#3453, master and 0.90)

Elasticsearch ecosystem

We try to give you some more information about what is happening in the ecosystem we are maintaining around elasticsearch, be it plugin or driver releases or news about kibana.

Elasticsearch community

Got an interesting open source project, plugin, driver or anything else for elasticsearch? Here is your time to shine! Just drop us a note and we will list it here (and on the .org website, of course!).

Meetups

Also, if you are interested in a core elasticsearch training, the next locations are Boston next week, Amsterdam (sold out!) at the 20th and Austin at the 24th og August. For more locations, check the training page

If you are interested in all this, we are hiring. We are interested in your skills, not in your location. Just drop us a note.