# How big a field can be

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-big-a-field-can-be/158810>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [November 29, 2018, 6:47pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-big-a-field-can-be/158810 "2018-11-29T18:47:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![onlygoodones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/71c47a/32.png) [@onlygoodones](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/onlygoodones)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2018, 6:47pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-big-a-field-can-be/158810/1 "2018-11-29T18:47:37Z")

</div>

Hello Gurus,

Is there a limit on how big a field can be when we ingest a document to ES ? What are the known issues or drawbacks while ingesting huge text / string data in to a single field and after ingestion, what are the drawbacks when it comes to search on those large fields. I am using ES version 6.2.

Thanks in advance  
Kumar

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![onlygoodones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/71c47a/32.png) [@onlygoodones](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/onlygoodones)\
**Post date:** [November 29, 2018, 7:52pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-big-a-field-can-be/158810/2 "2018-11-29T19:52:30Z")

</div>

I came across `ignore_above` setting  
[https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.2/ignore-above.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/6.2/ignore-above.html)

This option is also useful for protecting against Lucene’s term byte-length limit of `32766` .

The value for `ignore_above` is the _character count_ , but Lucene counts bytes. If you use UTF-8 text with many non-ASCII characters, you may want to set the limit to `32766 / 4 = 8191` since UTF-8 characters may occupy at most 4 bytes.

Quite did not understand what this means .. Thanks

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nik9000](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/nik9000/32/44947_2.png) [@nik9000](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nik9000)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2018, 5:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-big-a-field-can-be/158810/3 "2018-11-30T17:36:27Z")

</div>

You can have fairly long fields. Megabytes of text will work but some thing aren't super efficient. `keyword` typed fields that long won't be properly searchable because of `ignore_above` but `text` fields will be analysed and searchable. In general when you have fields that big you should think about breaking up the document into parts some how which will let you more quickly point users to _which_ part matched their query. That isn't always the right thing to do, but it is a thing to think about when you have very large fields.

---

<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:** [December 28, 2018, 5:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-big-a-field-can-be/158810/4 "2018-12-28T17:36:28Z")

</div>

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.