# Searching by Temporal Proximity

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/searching-by-temporal-proximity/21580>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [January 12, 2015, 10:30am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/searching-by-temporal-proximity/21580 "2015-01-12T10:30:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Paul\_Harvey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a4c791/32.png) [@Paul\_Harvey](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Paul_Harvey)\
**Post date:** [January 12, 2015, 10:30am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/searching-by-temporal-proximity/21580/1 "2015-01-12T10:30:11Z")

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I am quite new to ElasticSearch, most of what I need to seems to be easily  
supported however I have hit one problem - specifically searching by  
temporal proximity.

What do I mean by this? I'll explain a simplified scenario.

I have indexed events each with an associated date-time. I need to  
discover those events that occur within a given time period _of each other_.  
Ideally this time period would be arbitrary and specified at search time.

The "of each other" part is key here. I cannot just, say:

- Aggregate by week or month, as an event that occurs at the end of one  
month is within a month of one which occurs at the start of the next month  
but would fall into a different bucket.
- Do a date range based search, as I do not have a fixed range to search.

To describe what I need in a different way, in SQL I'd do something like:

SELECT eventid, eventdate from Events t1 where EXISTS(

SELECT 1 FROM Events t2 WHERE

t1.eventid \<\> t2.eventid AND

t1.eventdate BETWEEN

dateadd( day, -30, t2.eventdate )

AND

dateadd( day, 30, t2.eventdate )  
);

The actual scenario is more complex - each event has a type and what I need  
ultimately is to be able to answer questions of akin to:

"Find events of type X that occur with in 2 days of an event of type Y"

and even:

"Find events of type X that occur with in 2 days of an event of type Y and  
of type Z"

Each event will be nested in/a child of, a parent record and I am only  
interested in the temporal proximity of events with the same parent. The database  
has a total of 10^9 events, each parent may have the order of 10^3  
associated events. The use case is search heavy with ingests of deltas  
approximately weekly.

I can munge the data on import in any way that would help. I have had a  
couple of ideas on how to tackle the problem but neither are satisfactory.

I wondered whether there is a standard way to tackle this kind of  
requirement in ElasticSearch and whether anyone else had run up against it.

Thanks,

Paul.

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<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:** [July 6, 2017, 12:39am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/searching-by-temporal-proximity/21580/2 "2017-07-06T00:39:36Z")

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