[rectang]

Databases and search engines have different engineering priorities, and data integrity is not a top tier priority for search engine developers because a search engine is assumed not to be the primary data store. Search engines are designed to build an index which augments a data store and which can be regenerated when needed.

Anyone in engineering who recommends using a search engine as a primary data store is taking on risk of data loss for their organization that most non-engineering people do not understand.

In one org I worked for, we put the search engine in front of the database for retrieval, but we also made sure that the data was going to Postgres.

[9rx]

> Anyone in engineering who recommends using a search engine as a primary data store is taking on risk of data loss for their organization.

It is true that Elasticsearch was not designed for it, but there is no reason why another "search engine" designed for that purpose couldn't fit that role.