Disable order over Terms Aggregation

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

I have been experimenting out performance of different Elasticsearch queries. I intend to fetch all the unique values for a particular field. As the number of unique values increase, the time for performing Terms aggregation increase.

So I decided to split out the results into a number of partitions based on the results from cardinality query. This improved the performance of ES queries. I feel that the query can be further optimised if I somehow disable the order in which buckets are returned. Currently, I see that even within the partition the aggregations are sorted on the basis of doc_count (default behaviour). For my use case I don't require any of the sorting, is there a way to disable sorting for Terms Aggregation?

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I believe the default order is based on doc_count, and there isn't any document order similar to one we use in normal queries "sort": ["_doc"].

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Terms aggregation isn't really designed for returning "all" or very large sets of terms. It's optimized for the top-n scenario.

If you don't need top-n (e.g. don't care about order, and just want all the terms), you can use the newish composite aggregation: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-aggregations-bucket-composite-aggregation.html

This is a new type of agg that basically "scrolls" over the aggregation results in a memory-friendly manner, allowing you to paginate through the returned buckets and retrieve all the results without killing your cluster. The tradeoff is that there is no sorting available... which is fine for your use-case :slight_smile:

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