Index per user or Index for all users?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I've been listening to everybody saying that's better to share a same index for all users instead of a index per user. So each user would an alias.

From then on, I've ever guess that's the best solution for several reasons. However, It comes me up a situation I'd like you help me out for solving the next situation.

ES is a schemaless storage engine. Well, no problem, everything is all right until several users are able to build their schema.

For example, imagine a software product lets to users to tag his/her documents, and each tag has a name and a type. So, user says I want to tag my documents using a tag project of type string. At the same another user might tag his/her documents tagging them using a tag project of type numberThen ES could index documents using this tag, creating a field on a collection with name tag's name of type string/number... (my server application would serialize documents with this new field).

User1:
{ 
   "name": ""
   "department": ""
   "project": "xxx"   <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
}

User2:
{ 
   "name": ""
   "department": ""
   "project": 1000   <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
}

So, I mean each user is able to have his/her own schema.

I would like to ask for you could provide me an approach using only a single index for all users, or using a index per user.

I've to say that the most of the schema is similar for all users. So, all users shares 95% of an initially provided schema, nevertheless, each user is going to be able to add new schema fields...

I hope I've explained well.

1 Like