Insert data into elastic search

In this post, I am going to explain how to insert data into elastic search. The process of storing data into elastic search is called indexing.

Before storing a document, we need to decide where to store a document. I mean if you are storing an employee record into RDBMS, you have to know the database and table details. Same like database, we store a document into a type, and these types live inside an index.

Relational DB => Databases => Tables => Rows  => Columns

Elasticsearch  => Indices  => Types => Documents => Fields

In elastic search

a.   Index is similar to database in RDBMS

b.   Type is similar to table

c.    Document is similar to row in a table

d.   Field of document is similar to column of a row.

Elastic search cluster can contain multiple indexes, each index can have multiple types, each type can store number of documents, each document can have multiple fields.

When you insert a document into elastic search, by default every field in the document is indexed.

For our learning purpose, I am going to create document store for all employees of company xyz.

Index : xyz

Type : employees

Type employees contain all information about employees.

Following syntax is used to insert document.

PUT /{index}/{type}/{id}

{

  "field": "value",

  ...

}

It is time to insert first employee into type employees.

PUT /xyz/employees/1
{
  "firstName": "Phalgun",
  "lastName": "Garimella",
  "hobbies": [
    "Watching movies",
    "Stamp collection",
    "Reading books",
    "Playing Cricket"
  ],
  "age": 30
}

Observe the path “/xyz/employees/1”. It has three pieces of information.

xyz : The index name

employee : The type name

1 : The ID of this particular employee

Request body contains information about employee, we used PUT request to insert employee information into type employees.

Try to insert some more employee documents into employees type.

PUT /xyz/employees/2
{
  "firstName": "Sankalp",
  "lastName": "Dubey",
  "hobbies": [
    "Shopping",
    "Swimming",
    "Reading books"
  ],
  "age": 32
}

Above snippet insert second document into type employees.

Note:

a. Index name is always in lower case, otherwise, you will get following error.

{

   "error": "InvalidIndexNameException[[XYZ] Invalid index name [XYZ], must be lowercase]",

   "status": 400

}

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