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Comment by fallat | Hacker News Reader

So as someone who has heard about Elasticsearch for years and years, and seen all this, right this moment I've decided to see what it really is.

On their home page, "Why use Elastic search?", the reasons are basically:

* It's fast!

* It does a lot of stuff!

* It has some tools to visualize data!

* It's distributed!!

I have to say this is not very appealing to me since it sounds like something any database could do.

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You're starting from the wrong place if you're comparing Elasticsearch with a database. And you're also arriving at the wrong place if you think that any database can be distributed.

The Elastic website has a dedicated page to explain: https://www.elastic.co/what-is/elasticsearch

"Elasticsearch is a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene and was first released in 2010..."

I suggest understanding what it is first before comparing it to other databases.

A lot of databases handle many types of data.

Are you actually interested in learning about it or are you just criticizing the site?

Maybe try the Wikipedia article then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch

Elastic gives you a lot of the fancy stuff that SQL kinda needs extras and hard work for... but it's just a document store with fancy weighting features.

> just a document store

With a particular profile of efficiency choices and interfaces that might appeal to your project.

Elasticsearch is a no-sql database that optimizes for full-text searches, built atop Apache Lucene. If you're doing any kind of full-text search, for example, if you're trying to index a university library and make it searchable, then elasticsearch is for you. If you're not, I'd look elsewhere.

Devil is in the details.

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