The Elasticsearch data store

Elastic Stack Serverless

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine, scalable data store, and vector database built on Apache Lucene.

The documentation in this section details how Elasticsearch works as a data store starting with the fundamental unit of storage in Elasticsearch: the index. An index is a collection of documents uniquely identified by a name or an alias. Read more in Index basics.

Then, learn how these documents and the fields they contain are stored and indexed in Mapping, and how unstructured text is converted into a structured format that’s optimized for search in Text analysis.

You can also read more about working with Elasticsearch as a data store including how to use index templates to tell Elasticsearch how to configure an index when it is created, how to use aliases to point to multiple indices, and how to use the command line to manage data stored in Elasticsearch.

If your use case involves working with continuous streams of time series data, you may consider using a data stream. These are optimally suited for storing append-only data. The data can be accessed through a single, named resource, while it is stored in a series of hidden, auto-generated backing indices.