# Does kibana need \_source? can we just store file&byte offset and load doc at query time?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-kibana-need--source-can-we-just-store-file-byte-offset-and-load-doc-at-query-time/17116>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [April 21, 2014, 10:35pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-kibana-need--source-can-we-just-store-file-byte-offset-and-load-doc-at-query-time/17116 "2014-04-21T22:35:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Dieter\_Plaetinck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/eada6e/32.png) [@Dieter\_Plaetinck](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Dieter_Plaetinck)\
**Post date:** [April 21, 2014, 10:35pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-kibana-need--source-can-we-just-store-file-byte-offset-and-load-doc-at-query-time/17116/1 "2014-04-21T22:35:41Z")

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Hi,  
we have a lot of docs, and keeping all docs in ES would consume too much  
space, but we keep the data in text files, and would like to use ES for  
indexing and  
kibana for analytics.  
kibana needs docs with \_source / raw body, right? especially the table  
widget?

since our workload is very heavy on writes and very light on reads, could  
we instead of \_source just store a filename and byte offset pointer?  
and have ES just read the document from a given file & byte offset when it  
needs them (assuming file is available on ES node). or  
i could write a network service that receives a filename & byte offset and  
returns the corresponding document from a file.

that way the raw doc wouldn't have to be in ES, but ES could still return  
the full docs at query time, and hand them off to kibana?  
is that possible?

thanks,  
Dieter

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**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, 1:34am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/does-kibana-need--source-can-we-just-store-file-byte-offset-and-load-doc-at-query-time/17116/2 "2017-07-06T01:34:26Z")

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