Mapping arrays

An array or multi-value fields are very common in data models (such as multiple phone numbers, addresses, names, aliases, and so on), but not natively supported in traditional SQL solutions.

In SQL, multi-value fields require the creation of accessory tables that must be joined to gather all the values, leading to poor performance when the cardinality of records is huge.

Elasticsearch, which works natively in JSON, provides support for multi-value fields transparently.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started.

To execute these commands, any HTTP client can be used, such as curl (https://curl...