How to 'empty' a big index?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi there,

I am in the situation to have a regular index (not a time-series index & not a data stream).
This index got really big - about 13GB. Because of its nature I cannot use ILM.

What can I do instead to have an empty index so to say?
The data in it is of no interest.

It is one primary and no replica.

Any hint would helps - thanks!

Cheers!

2

Hi @smm

What exactly do you mean "empty" the index... If you do not want any of the data you can just delete the entire data... I suspect that is not what you want

You can use delete_by_query to clean out documents. This will delete the documents that match the query BE CAREFUL.

Elastic marks these documents as deleted, and eventually, they will be "expunged" by merging in the background

To speed this up, you can run a force merge with expunge deletes to clean up the deleted documents

with

only_expunge_deletes boolean true
Specify whether the operation should only expunge deleted documents