[shoelessone]

Can somebody help me understand as a casual Elasticsearch (and honestly, more OpenSearch) user how so much data inside of Elasticsearch ends up not becoming the "database"?

I've always understood you're not supposed to treat ES/OS as a database, so in my head I've always sort of thought of it as a cache. If I'm using it I need to be able to reindex (not sure if this is the correct term technically) all of my data from a "real" database, something (in my case) like a SQL database of some sort or another data store.

If I'm reading the article correctly it sounds like they are trying to get massive amounts of data out of ES, but it feels like that's something that would come from a "real" database. To put it another way, it seems like admin tasks that involve exporting data ES wouldn't be the right place to do that.

Now very clearly the author knows an entire world more about ES and I don't fully understand their use case anyway, so I'm hoping somebody might be able to help me understand if there is some gray area or uses for ES/OS that might make different use cases more appropriate?

[atombender]

You're right. They're arguably running into these challenges because they're using Elasticsearch in a way it's not intended to be used.