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Things I learned at NDC London: ElasticSearch River Plugin

After the first 2 days of workshops, NDC London continued with lots of great speakers and sessions. I was planning to share some information during the conference itself but due to technical difficulties I had to postpone it. For the next few days I will be sharing some of the great content.

I’m already using ElasticSearch, so one of the sessions I didn’t want to miss was Full Text Searching & Ranking with ElasticSearch.

It was a great session overall. One of the things that was new to me was the concept of a ‘River’.  The ‘River’ is a metaphor for the stream of constant data. That constant data stream can come in different forms and from different sources.

Rivers in elasticsearch provides you with functionality that listens for changes in another data source and apply them to elasticsearch. Rivers are allocated to nodes within the cluster. They are provided with automatic failover in case of node failure, and allow to store state associated with them.

There are multiple River plugins out there, some of them are build by the ElasticSearch team themselves, other come from the community.

Supported by Elasticsearch

Supported by the community

Note: If you are looking for SQL support, this is possible through the JDBC driver.

More information: http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/the-river/

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