Introduction

Before starting with indexing and searching in Elasticsearch, we need to cover how to manage indices and perform operations on documents. In this chapter, we'll start discussing different operations on indices such as create, delete, update, open, and close. These operations are very important because they allow you to better define the container (index) that will store your documents. The index create/delete actions are similar to the SQL create/delete database commands.

After the indices management part, we'll learn how to manage mappings to complete the discussion started in the previous chapter and to lay the basis for the next chapter which is mainly centered on search.

A large portion of this chapter is dedicated to Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) operations on records that are the core of records storing and management in Elasticsearch.

To improve indexing performance, it's also important to understand bulk operations and avoid their common pitfalls.

This chapter doesn't...