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by brasetvik 4515 days ago
Sometimes, I actually find it easier to have more systems that do their job really well and sync things between them, rather than trying to get a single system to do everything.

For example, Postgres lets you reason about integrity, atomicity and transactional boundaries, and whether things are really safely stored with synchronous replication. If Postgres returns after a commit, I trust it. However, that requires me to have two servers working, which is harder to keep highly available.

ZooKeeper, on the other hand, I can rely on being available. But that's not really something you want to be putting lots of load on, nor try to do anything but trivial "queries". And the more servers you add, the slower writes get.

I don't trust Elasticsearch enough for those tasks, yet I wouldn't want to do searches in Postgres (Yep, I'm familiar with tsearch) even though it can. Elasticsearch is simple to scale out and awesome for searching.

Logs and metrics we shove straight into Elasticsearch, however. Other things go from ZooKeeper to Postgres and then to Elasticsearch, or from just Postgres to Elasticsearch.

Separate tools for separate jobs. I'm one of the co-founders of www.found.no, one of the hosted Elasticsearch providers . We absolutely love Elasticsearch and find new use cases for it all the time, but it's not going to be the one store to rule them all, at least not very soon.

1 comments

I'd like to point out that two competing founders of hosted Elasticsearch as a service agree: ES is great, but not a general-purpose data store :-)
Hi, Nick. :)

Indeed!

That said, it's great that more people are picking up Elasticsearch for new exciting things.

Elasticsearch has really pushed what constitutes a "search problem", and deserves lots of kudos for that! :)