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Maybe you are thinking of Aphyr's analysis of elastic search where he showed that Elastic can lose indexed documents during network partitions:

https://aphyr.com/posts/323-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch-1-5-...

That has been done on relatively old version. Elastic documents known (and fixed) issues here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur... but I wouldn't trust this to the letter mainly because of their previous handling of such issues.

Elastic is great as a search index, not as a primary database.




Thanks for your clarification.

Not using it as a primary database is fine and I understand that it's not designed for that. But I need to trust the results when I query it. Is it designed for fuzzy searches on many documents when missing one or two documents has no consequences or can I trust that I will always retrieve all documents that should match my query ?


In theory with correct settings you should get all (or be told that the results are partial, e.g when shard is unavailable or timed out).

In practice there are bugs, which are notoriously difficult to find and reproduce when you go distributed. Jepsen is closest to that I know about.


Thanks again. Distributed systems are difficults. I think I should have gone with a old school PostgreSQL.




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