Speeding up atomic operations (bulk)

When we are inserting/deleting/updating a large number of documents, the HTTP overhead is significant to speed up the process, which ElasticSearch allows executing bulk of calls.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster.

How to do it...

As we are changing the state of the data the HTTP method is POST and the following is the REST URL:

http://<server>/<index_name/_bulk

For executing a bulk action, we need to perform the following steps:

1. We need to collect the create/index/delete/update commands in a structure made up of bulk JSON lines, composed by a line of action with metadata and another line optional of data related to the action. Every line must be ended with a newline character "\n".

   A bulk datafile should be as follows:

   { "index":{ "_index":"myindex", "_type":"order", "_id":"1" } }
   { "field1" : "value1",  "field2" : "value2"  }
   { "delete":{ "_index":"myindex", "_type":"order", "_id":"2" } }
   { "create":{ "_index":"myindex", "_type...