# Bulk operations

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-operations/2805>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [February 10, 2010, 9:30pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-operations/2805 "2010-02-10T21:30:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![NevB](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f4b2a3/32.png) [@NevB](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/NevB)\
**Post date:** [February 10, 2010, 9:30pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-operations/2805/1 "2010-02-10T21:30:42Z")

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Hi,

Does ElasticSearch support bulk PUT requests.

By that I mean something like:

curl -XPUT [http://localhost:9200/](http://localhost:9200/) -d   
'[{ \_index: "twitter", \_type: "user", \_id: "1", \_source: { name:  
"Fred" }}, { \_index: "twitter", \_type: "user", \_id: "2", \_source:  
{ name: "John" }}]'

This type of PUT is needed by AJAX apps which construct a list of  
entries which are submitted as a single 'transaction' for example, an  
order document which is comprised of multiple types

Thanks for your thoughts,

Neville

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**Author:** ![kimchy](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/kimchy/32/44952_2.png) [@kimchy](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/kimchy)\
**Post date:** [February 10, 2010, 11:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-operations/2805/2 "2010-02-10T23:04:32Z")

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Elasticsearch does not currently support bulk operations. There are several  
reasons to support bulk operations, lets analyze them:

1. Bulk operations might imply transactionality (or atomicity at the very  
least). Meaning that either all operations succeed or fail. I don't see this  
feature getting into Elasticsearch in the near future because of the  
complexity in implementing it in distributed systems. If the operations go  
to different shards, this might means a two phase commit process, and even  
if all go to the same shard, its not simple to implement on top of Lucene  
and still maintain high throughput.

2. Bulk operations can be used to speed up processing. For example, send a  
single message with 1000 operations instead of 1000 messages. This does make  
sense for Elasticsearch (and the reason why bulking will be supported in the  
near future (no atomicity across all operations though, just a status on  
each one if it failed or not). But, you should know that Elasticsearch is  
highly optimized for concurrent usage and built using complete event driven  
IO architecture. So, if you have 1000 operations, simply fork 10 threads to  
do them, and you should get really good numbers (and I mean, really good  
numbers 🙂 ) for now. Moreover, if you have a good http async client lib,  
then simply send all the indexing requests on a single thread, and register  
a listener for the results.

-shay.banon

On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 11:30 PM, NevB [neville.burnell@gmail.com](mailto:neville.burnell@gmail.com) wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Does Elasticsearch support bulk PUT requests.
> 
> By that I mean something like:
> 
> curl -XPUT [http://localhost:9200/](http://localhost:9200/) -d   
> '[{ \_index: "twitter", \_type: "user", \_id: "1", \_source: { name:  
> "Fred" }}, { \_index: "twitter", \_type: "user", \_id: "2", \_source:  
> { name: "John" }}]'
> 
> This type of PUT is needed by AJAX apps which construct a list of  
> entries which are submitted as a single 'transaction' for example, an  
> order document which is comprised of multiple types
> 
> Thanks for your thoughts,
> 
> Neville

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 4:25am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/bulk-operations/2805/3 "2017-07-06T04:25:50Z")

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