How about elasticsearch as a pure database for an app in educational domain with many many and huge articles?

[vamsyr (vamsi)]

Hi,

I am still a beginner in elasticsearch.

Currently, I am developing an app in the educational domain.

The app is going to have hundreds of articles and each article can be up to 1 MB of textual data.

I am planning to use elasticsearch itself as the database also for my app to store all the articles.

And, whenever an user selects an article, I need to fetch that 1 MB of textual data from elasticsearch and render.

If all goes as expected there could be thousands of users accessing hundreds of articles at the same time.

Considering these points, can I use elasticsearch as a database for all the articles of my educational app?

Please suggest. Appreciate your valuable feedback.

Thank you,

[dadoonet (David Pilato)]

At the very least you should give it a try. I mean that building a POC should not take a long time and it will give you a good idea of what you can achieve in some hours...

I'd say yes. Elasticsearch is used to power search on many sites like Wikipedia for example. I believe they have to index huge texts and it seems to work really well

If you don't want to start/manage elasticsearch yourself, you can try for free for 15 days cloud.elastic.co. You'll get a cluster up and running where you will just have to send some data...

[thn (tri-man)]

I think if you store document text in the index, one of the benefits is the search "query string" in the documents can be highlighted in the results or when viewing the content.

If the original documents are in PDF, Word (.doc or .docx), PowerPoint (.ppt or .pptx) or similar, you'll need to convert them to text before indexing them. You can store the "extracted text content" in ES. I would also add the URL accessible to the original documents along with the text so if you need to, your app can provide links to the original documents.

[vamsyr (vamsi)]

Thank you very much.