Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a great open source search engine built on top of Apache Lucene. Its features and upgrades allow it to basically function just like a schema-less JSON datastore that can be accessed using both search-specific methods and regular database CRUD-like commands. It is a real-time distributed search and analytics engine. It allows you to explore your data at a speed and at a scale never before possible. It is used for full-text search, structured search, analytics, and all three in combination:

• Wikipedia uses Elasticsearch to provide full-text search with highlighted search snippets, and search-as-you-type and did-you-mean suggestions.
• The Guardian uses Elasticsearch to combine visitor logs with social -network data to provide real-time feedback to its editors about the public’s response to new articles.
• Stack Overflow combines full-text search with geolocation queries and uses more-like-this to find related questions and answers.
• GitHub uses Elasticsearch to query 130 billion lines of code.

Elasticsearch is much more than just Lucene and much more than “just” full-text search. It can also be described as follows:

• A distributed real-time document store where every field is indexed and searchable
• A distributed search engine with real-time analytics
• Capable of scaling to hundreds of servers and petabytes of structured and unstructured data

And it packages up all this functionality into a standalone server that your application can talk to via a simple RESTful API, using a web client from your favorite programming language, or even from the command line.

Elasticsearch can be used to search all kinds of documents. It provides scalable search, has near real-time search, and supports multitenancy. Elasticsearch is distributed, which means that indices can be divided into shards and each shard can have zero or more replicas. Each node hosts one or more shards, and acts as a coordinator to delegate operations to the correct shard(s). Rebalancing and routing are done automatically.

Another feature is called "gateway" and handles the long term persistence of the index; for example, an index can be recovered from the gateway in a case of a server crash. Elasticsearch supports real-time GET requests, which makes it suitable as a NoSQL solution, but it lacks distributed transactions.

website: https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch