# Remove a Text field while being indexing over ES

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [July 30, 2019, 9:41am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860 "2019-07-30T09:41:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![flyboyacsrao](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/9de053/32.png) [@flyboyacsrao](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/flyboyacsrao)\
**Post date:** [July 30, 2019, 9:41am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860/1 "2019-07-30T09:41:03Z")

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Hi Team

We are trying to ingest an index with 10 fields, while we see that the message field has very large data, so we want to either skip this field entirely from writing to ES, is this possible through any mapping setting.  
We are using ES 6.8 Basic license, and the index is written by application directly, so we need a solution to do this change from ES ends only.  
Please provide your suggestions.

Thanks  
Flyboy

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![flyboyacsrao](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/9de053/32.png) [@flyboyacsrao](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/flyboyacsrao)\
**Post date:** [July 31, 2019, 3:40am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860/2 "2019-07-31T03:40:47Z")

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Hi Team,

Can any please post some suggestions

Thanks  
flyboyacsrao

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**Author:** ![spinscale](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/spinscale/32/25011_2.png) [@spinscale](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/spinscale)\
**Post date:** [August 1, 2019, 12:50pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860/3 "2019-08-01T12:50:19Z")

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Please do not bump your topic after one day of inactivity. Keep in mind that this a completely voluntary forum. If you need answers within an SLA, think about getting commercial support.

You could use an ingest pipeline, which can be configured as an index setting by setting [index.default.pipeline](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.2/index-modules.html), to [remove](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.2/remove-processor.html) that field. However than this field would also vanish from the JSON.

You could alternatively not index that field [in the mapping](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.2/mapping-index.html) which would probably already save some space on disk.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![flyboyacsrao](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/9de053/32.png) [@flyboyacsrao](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/flyboyacsrao)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2019, 3:51am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860/4 "2019-08-02T03:51:02Z")

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Hi Alex

Thanks for the suggestion.,  
Since the issue was in a PROD setup, i was in a hurry to find alternatives.  
Currently we just changed the mapping for the index by adding:

"\_source": {  
"excludes": [  
"description"  
]},  
after type and then at the column within properties, we set the column as

"description" : {  
"enabled" : "false"

This setting saved us almost 80% space, earlier the index was 21 GB and after mapping change, it reduced to 3 GB.

We actually dont want to use this column for any thing, more over this was storing encrypted data.

Thanks  
flyboyacsrao

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![spinscale](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/spinscale/32/25011_2.png) [@spinscale](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/spinscale)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2019, 8:03am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860/5 "2019-08-02T08:03:55Z")

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sounds good! great improvement that should give you some headroom. I suppose the main question is, if you really need that column in the source or not, as it could be exposed to the outside.

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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:** [August 30, 2019, 8:04am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/remove-a-text-field-while-being-indexing-over-es/192860/6 "2019-08-30T08:04:03Z")

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