[ckan-dev] Elastic search datastore

Mon Oct 26 11:29:00 UTC 2015

Hi -

I was wondering if anyone could shed a bit of light regarding the decision to move the datastore from elasticsearch to postgres?  Were there reasons why elasticsearch was considered unsuitable?

We're using CKAN at the NHM for one pretty big dataset (2.8m+ records) - with other, larger datasets coming online next year.  We needed people to explore these datasets, filter on any field etc.,. and postgres really struggled, probably in large part due to us shoehorning our messy data into a one-table structure. So we installed SOLR to provide the search index for that dataset which works well.  

We're now trying to scale up, and were consisdering that the postgres datastore would be redundant if we switched to using SOLR / elasticsearch to index all our datasets.  But aflter looking into it and realising previous versions of CKAN had already used elasticsearch for the datastore, we don't want to make the same mistakes if that approach has been tried and failed.

Also if we did proceed, would any other sites find an elasticsearch-based datastore plugin useful?

Thanks for any help,
Ben