# One index or many indecies for documents in diffrent groups?

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-index-or-many-indecies-for-documents-in-diffrent-groups/155904>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [November 8, 2018, 2:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-index-or-many-indecies-for-documents-in-diffrent-groups/155904 "2018-11-08T14:22:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![PeterSkarmyr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ee7513/32.png) [@PeterSkarmyr](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/PeterSkarmyr)\
**Post date:** [November 8, 2018, 2:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-index-or-many-indecies-for-documents-in-diffrent-groups/155904/1 "2018-11-08T14:22:22Z")

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I think this question is best described by using an example.  
Say I have one index called "myindex". The fields in this index have the following structure:

- Each document in this index contains a field called "group" which has a value between 1 and 100.
- Each document in the index has 20 fields which have the same name and datatype across all documents.
- Each document in group x has 5-20 fields which are only used by group x.

Should all these documents be stored in one index or should I make one index per group?

Some of the searches and visualisations I use in kibana will be across many groups. This means that if I split the data into one index per group there will be searches and aggregations done over many elasticsearch-indecies. Will this impact performance?

If I keep everything in one index, it will contain hundreds of fields, but only 25-40 fields will be "used" in each document. How will this impact performance?

Are there any other ways of structuring this, other than the two options I have considered in this post?

Thanks.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2018, 2:22pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/one-index-or-many-indecies-for-documents-in-diffrent-groups/155904/2 "2018-12-06T14:22:31Z")

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