Stability of Update By Query

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

I am currently running a production cluster with ES 1.7 installed. currently I rely on the UpdateByQuery plugin and since the release of ES 2.0 there has not been an update to that plugin to support ES 2.X. I noticed a while back that the functionality is now baked in ES with the new Update By Query API

The only problem that is preventing me from upgrading to the latest ES version is the warning displayed at the top of the API's documentation stating that this API should be considered experimental. I know that changes can be made to the API in future versions and that is fine by me but I was wondering how stable the API currently is for a production cluster.

I have done some small tests with the API and it all seems to be working fine but I was wondering if there are any known issues, limitations or bugs with the current version.

Best regards

2

This is our little out for semver - we're not yet confident enough in the API to guarantee that we won't make breaking changes to it in a minor release. We think we might find things that are super important that we'll have to add or remove. We aren't going to do anything like that in a patch release though. And we're not going to make backwards incompatible changes lightly either.

So you should be quite safe using so long as you test your application before upgrading Elasticsearch which you should do anyway. Maybe just be extra careful.

3

Also if you read the very first lines of the plugin you were using:

The update by query API allows all documents that with the query to be updated with a script. This is experimental.

:slight_smile:

4

Yes I know that and I had the same discussion before with the authors about that particular thing.

I always panic when I hear the word 'experimental;' :wink: