Doing aggregations using flattened_fields is slow

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

We consume and store data containing a field filter_properties containing key => value fields.
Up until now we use dynamic mapping to store that data but that's creating a lot of unique fields.
So I decided to try the flattened_field type.

I now have a mapping looking like this:

    {
      "mappings" : {
        "dynamic_templates" : [
          {
            "filterprops" : {
              "path_match" : "filter_properties.*",
              "mapping" : {
                "fields" : {
                  "analyzed" : {
                    "normalizer" : "sort_normalizer",
                    "type" : "keyword"
                  }
                },
                "index" : true,
                "norms" : false,
                "type" : "keyword"
              }
            }
          }
       ],
       "properties": {
          "filters" : {
            "dynamic" : "strict",
            "properties" : {
              "analyzed" : {
                "type" : "flattened",
               "eager_global_ordinals": true
              },
              "raw" : {
                "type" : "flattened",
               "eager_global_ordinals": true
              }
            }
          }
       }
      }
    }

But doing aggregations using the new filters fields is "very" slow.
Doing a query like this (using the flattened_field) takes between 200/300 ms

POST my_index/_search
{
  "query": {
    "match_all": {}
  },
  "aggs": {
    "foo": {
      "terms": {
        "field": "filters.raw.QBC",
        "size": 300
      }
    }
  }
}

Where this query on the same index takes between 20/30 ms

POST my_index/_search
{
  "query": {
    "match_all": {}
  },
  "aggs": {
    "foo": {
      "terms": {
        "field": "filters_propertied.QBC",
        "size": 300
      }
    }
  }
}

Clearly I'm missing something here but I don't see it. Anyone have any pointers for me?

2

When you index concrete fields you have dedicated data structures on disk. e.g. given fields obj.foo and obj.bar you have 2 different doc value data structures you can effectively index directly into via the Lucene doc id:

obj.foo : ["a", , , , , "b", , , ]
obj.bar : ["c", , "a", , , ,]

So if your query matches docs 1, 4 and 7 you can index efficiently into the values for field obj.foo and retrieve the single values for this field.

With a flattened field the field names and values are combined so the above data structure is logically more like this on disk:

    obj:  [
                  [....]
                  ["obj.baz:other", "obj.foo:a", "obj.z:blah" , ...],
                  [....],
                  ["obj.blah:misc", "obj.foo:b", "obj.z:etc", ... ],
                  [...]
                  ["obj.baz:other", "obj.foo:c", "obj.z:blah" , ...],
    ]

You can still index into this structure based on doc ID but the doc values aren't single fields. They are arrays of all fieldnames+values for a doc that you need to iterate across and filter for the obj.foo field name you're aggregating on. This is slower.

3

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