Elasticsearch is an enterprise search tool from Elastic in Mountain View, California.
$16
per month
PostgreSQL
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
PostgreSQL (alternately Postgres) is a free and open source object-relational database system boasting over 30 years of active development, reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It supports SQL and is designed to support various workloads flexibly.
Elasticsearch is really well suited for searching text (Natural Language Processing) and you can fine tune the searches and scoring very well. I like the ability to find Significant Terms in the Index, where you can find aggregations that are really relevant to a specific search. It also allows for queries to lead to new queries via aggregations which is great for navigating your data. It is less suited to doing more complex aggregations where slices of data are required to be processing using guassian normalizations. And doing searches which join different documents is very very hard, and requires serious thought on how to denormalize data.
PostgreSQL is ideal for handling databases that contain large volumes of information due to its efficiency, speed and above all because of the good management it makes of our resources, it also behaves very well in distributed environments of high demand, if you want a database of stable data and excellent performance PostgreSQL is one of the best.
Setting Java memory thresholds can be a pain for those not accustomed to things like Eden Space & Old Generation which can lead to over allocation, or more likely, under allocation. Apache Solr had a similar issue. It would be nice if the program would take an extra step and dogfood it's own advice by analyzing the system & processes to return a solid recommendation for that configuration. The proper configuration information is outlined in the documentation, it would be nice if that was automated.
The only health check that ElasticSearch reports back is a "red" status without any real solid information about what is going on, though its usually memory thresholds or disk I/O. I am currently on ElasticSearch 1.5 so that may have changed for newer versions. When the status goes "red", I as the administrator of the software, feel like I lose control of whats going on which should rarely happen. Something more verbose would eliminate that.
This is more of a critique of the ElasticStack in general. The whole top to bottom stack is starting to get feature creep with things that are better suited in other software and increasing the barrier for entry for people to get started with setting up a robust logging infrastructure. ElasticSearch as a storage search engine, is pretty streamlined, but I can see that the tools that comprise the ELK Stack are going to require a certification with constant study at some point. During major release for Logstash a while back, it literally took a month to learn a new language because Elastic completely changed the syntax. For a medium sized organization of only a couple of admins, that is a pretty high bar where time is money. They really should work on refining/automating the tools & search engine they have, instead of shoehorning/changing things on to an already rock solid foundation.
The performance of PostgreSQL has been enhanced through the years, but always is better to have as much performance as we can.
The replication services could be done directly within the database, and more easily.
The Object Orientation of the Database could be extended, and albeit it manages inheritance of tables, and accepts XML and JSON as primary types, it would be wonderful if one could attach methods more easily to tables (to make them more like classes), and instances (rows for example).
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
Postgresql is the best tool out there for relational data so I have to give it a high rating when it comes to analytics, data availability and consistency, so on and so forth. SQL is also a relatively consistent language so when it comes to building new tables and loading data in from the OLTP database, there are enough tools where we can perform ETL on a scalable basis.
The data queries are relatively quick for a small to medium sized table. With complex joins, and a wide and deep table however, the performance of the query has room for improvement.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
AWS, Heroku, and Digital Ocean all provide Postgres-as-a-service, where you pretty much never need to administrate it yourself but they do it for you. The Postgres community also has developed awesome and reasonably priced extensions, such as Citus DB and CockroachDB in case you need additional support for running it. If you need documentation, Postgres's docs are super thorough and their official forms are active.
The online training is request based. Had there been recorded videos available online for potential users to benefit from, I could have rated it higher. The online documentation however is very helpful. The online documentation PDF is downloadable and allows users to pace their own learning. With examples and code snippets, the documentation is great starting point.
Elasticsearch is the most well-known and supported free data platform that we identified. We are taking advantage of community knowledge and practices. In terms of flexibility and breadth of use cases no other competitor came close to Elasticsearch. We've tried Solr in the past be we encountered issues which were deal-breaking for us. MongoDB - it just did not pass our evaluation parameters as a main data platform. We still use it for smaller purposes, though.
In this case, Postgres is preferred because it handles large data sets and requires fewer hardware resources than its competitor, MySQL. Compared to PostgreSQL, Microsoft products are excellent, but the installation process for MS SQL is lengthy. PostgreSQL has an advantage over its competitors in that it can adapt or configure third-party programs, applications, or settings.
I am not in finance and I suspect even if I was this would be hard to measure. But for sure, Elasticsearch has enabled us to have the most flexible data model in the industry for our customer's data, and in doing so we have attracted many many technical customers and got much of their $$$.
One problem with Elasticsearch is that because it runs on the JVM, there can be some stop-the-world JVM garbage collections happening that can take down nodes and reduce indexing speed. The solution for that tends to be "let's just upgrade the CPU on that machine". And before you know it you are paying $$$ because this'll happen with 40+ machines.
On the other hand, I do think that ES is more efficient than other systems and so it requires fewer nodes to keep it highly tolerant and available, so we probably saved some money that way.
Easy to administer so our DevOps team has only ever used minimal time to setup, tune, and maintain.
Easy to interface with so our Engineering team has only ever used minimal time to query or modify the database. Getting the data is straightforward, what we do with it is the bigger concern.
