The basics of aggregations

In contrast to searching, analytics deals with the bigger picture. Searching addresses the need for zooming in to a few records, whereas analytics address the need for zooming out and slicing the data in different ways.

While learning about searching, we used the following API:

POST /<index_name>/_search
{
  "query": 
  {
    ... type of query ...
  }
}

All aggregation queries take a common form. Let's go over the structure.

The aggregations, or aggs, element allows us to aggregate data. All aggregation requests take the following form:

POST /<index_name>/_search
{  
  "aggs": {                                 
    ... type of aggregation ...
          },
  "query": {  ... type of query ... },              //optional query part
  "size": 0                                         //size typically set to 0
}

...