11–20 of 32 posts
Does Elasticsearch need to be as complicated as it is? I was surprised to find there wasn't an Elasticsearch + Kibana competitor that is "simpler". I just want to be able to store JSON logs with a timestamp + a bunch of fields then search them in a nice little UI later. Apparently, that's pretty hard to do right.
Shameless plug from someone who want this project to flourish. Check https://vespa.ai as an alternative to Elasticsearch. Migrating from a ES to it, I got a faster search, never had to face a unhealthy node and native tensor support (And Native ANN is coming soon https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/issues/9747 ). Very mature, and still progressing at a neck-break rate ( https://blog.vespa.ai )
It's got a mishmash of odd APIs, lots of XML, several query languages, lots of weird little quirks. It doesn't feel modern. It's pretty clear that this is originally an in-house project, developed over many years by many people, where not as much effort has been spent on consistent/cohesive design or documentation.
One rough area is the approach to schemas and indexing. Rather than let you define a "clean" schema and put in your data and then have Vespa index it in all the ways it knows about, you're forced to essentially reshape your data into a format compatible with Vespa, which brings with it some severe restrictions. For example, Vespa will not index arbitrarily nested structured data. If you have something like {categories: [{id: 1}]}, Vespa will not index that. You have to flatten any array data to the top level. Nested maps and arrays are mostly not supported, although it's hard to tell from the documentation what is supported.
Vespa is also very obviously skewed toward ranking, not filtering. You can't search by exact string matching: You can't do something like "topic = 'news'". You only get case insensitive substring search. It's got lot of ranking functions but very little that's optimized for filtering.
Overall, I'm a bit surprised that Vespa's authors position it as an Elasticsearch competitor, because you certainly cannot just port an app that uses ES over to it.
To be sure, it's got lots of interesting features such as ML integration, and, again, performance and clustering design seems good. But it still feels very much like a niche product.
Does Elasticsearch need to be as complicated as it is? I was surprised to find there wasn't an Elasticsearch + Kibana competitor that is "simpler". I just want to be able to store JSON logs with a timestamp + a bunch of fields then search them in a nice little UI later. Apparently, that's pretty hard to do right.
We ditched Elastic as it was a super massive PITA to operate (& a resource hog at that). I'll admit I'm not an expert at ELK at all, but tbh I was absolutely surprised just how bad Elastic + Kibana was for our basic log uses when they tout it as one of their mainstays. Or we were just exceptionally stupid, who knows. In any case, the experience we had with it didn't motivate us to become ELK experts at all. Our pet peeves:
- The Kibana UI needlessly wastes tons screen for whitespace
- makes it hard to dig down into logs
- never seems to find exact string matches when we wanted it to and instead returns "helpful" fuzzy matches
- Kibana has no qualms sending requests to Elastic that will happily kill your node instead of applying sensible paging / query timeouts. I mean that's why I'm using Kibana and not writing my own elastic frontend...
Does Elasticsearch need to be as complicated as it is? I was surprised to find there wasn't an Elasticsearch + Kibana competitor that is "simpler". I just want to be able to store JSON logs with a timestamp + a bunch of fields then search them in a nice little UI later. Apparently, that's pretty hard to do right.
There is a presentation version of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpX7J-G2PEo&feature=youtu.be (I made the presentation first and then wrote the blog posts)
I wrote a follow-up at called Elasticsearch from the Top Down here: https://www.elastic.co/blog/found-elasticsearch-top-down
Shameless plug from someone who want this project to flourish. Check https://vespa.ai as an alternative to Elasticsearch. Migrating from a ES to it, I got a faster search, never had to face a unhealthy node and native tensor support (And Native ANN is coming soon https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa/issues/9747 ). Very mature, and still progressing at a neck-break rate ( https://blog.vespa.ai )
Vespa looks pretty good, at least in terms of performance and operation. I've been evaluating it myself. I'm less happy about everything else. It's got a mishmash of odd APIs, lots of XML, several query languages, lots of weird little quirks. It doesn't feel modern. It's pretty clear that this is originally an in-house project, developed over many years by many people, where not as much effort has been spent on consi…
- Nested (For my use cases, this is a problem I do not have. For more complex cases, there is parent-child https://blog.vespa.ai/post/174589826190/parent-child-in-vesp...)
- Exact match ( use the exact match https://docs.vespa.ai/documentation/reference/search-definit... )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vespa looks pretty good, at least in terms of performance and operation. I've been evaluating it myself. I'm less happy about everything else. It's got a mishmash of odd APIs, lots of XML, several query languages, lots of weird little quirks. It doesn't feel modern. It's pretty clear that this is originally an in-house project, developed over many years by many people, where not as much effort has been spent on consi…
I migrated from ES and for me, I do not agree about the feeling that it doesn't feel modern. The Middleware logic container and Live reconfiguration it is mind blowing. About those two things: - Nested (For my use cases, this is a problem I do not have. For more complex cases, there is parent-child https://blog.vespa.ai/post/174589826190/parent-child-in-vesp... ) - Exact match ( use the exact match https://docs.vespa…
Parent: I do not have that problem.
Does Elasticsearch need to be as complicated as it is? I was surprised to find there wasn't an Elasticsearch + Kibana competitor that is "simpler". I just want to be able to store JSON logs with a timestamp + a bunch of fields then search them in a nice little UI later. Apparently, that's pretty hard to do right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vespa looks pretty good, at least in terms of performance and operation. I've been evaluating it myself. I'm less happy about everything else. It's got a mishmash of odd APIs, lots of XML, several query languages, lots of weird little quirks. It doesn't feel modern. It's pretty clear that this is originally an in-house project, developed over many years by many people, where not as much effort has been spent on consi…
I migrated from ES and for me, I do not agree about the feeling that it doesn't feel modern. The Middleware logic container and Live reconfiguration it is mind blowing. About those two things: - Nested (For my use cases, this is a problem I do not have. For more complex cases, there is parent-child https://blog.vespa.ai/post/174589826190/parent-child-in-vesp... ) - Exact match ( use the exact match https://docs.vespa…
Another thing that felt antiquated: The whole notion of uploading an "application". I can appreciate the benefits of controlling the lifecycle of the configuration and have Vespa distribute it to nodes. But when you start out, that "application" is just one or two files, and yet you have to create a whole directory structure for it, as opposed to just POSTing individual configs to REST endpoints like you can do with ES. The heavy-handedness of it feels very "Java".
The document you linked to is a different type of exact match. I've been through this, and even posted a Github issue. Mysteriously, a Vespa developer replied that nobody had ever needed exact string matching, so nobody had bothered to implement it.
Parent/child is not applicable to what I was talking about, I think. I'm not talking about hierarchical relationships.
For my part, most of my work is in structured data, not text or vector-based ranking, and Vespa really doesn't seem to be designed for that.
ES also has a very, very good aggregation API. Vespa's aggregation syntax is odd and seemingly much more limited.