# Term Filter by document

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/term-filter-by-document/16371>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [March 14, 2014, 6:00am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/term-filter-by-document/16371 "2014-03-14T06:00:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Allon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7993a0/32.png) [@Allon](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Allon)\
**Post date:** [March 14, 2014, 6:00am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/term-filter-by-document/16371/1 "2014-03-14T06:00:20Z")

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When I read the case for using a term filter from a field of a document, it  
made perfect sense that it would be completely unwieldy to have to fetch  
over the wire, then submit back over the wire what could potentially be  
tens or hundreds of thousands of values. But when I read the solution that  
can only point to the values stored within a single document it didn't make  
sense to me how you could create or manage a document of that size to begin  
with?

Effectively, if you want to follow the tweets of your followers, all of  
your followers need to be stored on the same user document. Eventually  
your list of followers could grow quite big but to add or remove followers  
you need to get and update the document with potentially hundreds of  
thousands of followers over the wire anyway. Right? So I don't understand  
the value.

Could someone explain it to me because I would really like to filter  
documents that relate to a large set of changing values. It seems like  
this filter could only be used against types that don't change frequently.

Thanks,

-Allon

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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:** [July 6, 2017, 1:43am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/term-filter-by-document/16371/2 "2017-07-06T01:43:15Z")

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