This document provides an introduction to Elasticsearch, including:
- Elasticsearch is a document-oriented search engine that uses JSON documents and Apache Lucene for indexing and searching. It allows for horizontal scaling across distributed nodes.
- Elasticsearch is well-suited for full-text search, acting as a fast read database with simple data structures to minimize impedance mismatch. Common uses include logs with Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.
- Key concepts include nodes, clusters, indexes, mapping types, shards, the inverted index, and the REST API for interacting with Elasticsearch.