Before Elasticsearch6.x, the analogy wrt Relational Databases was:
Relational DB ⇒ Databases ⇒ Tables ⇒ Rows ⇒ Columns Elasticsearch ⇒ Indices ⇒ Types ⇒ Documents ⇒ Fields
which led to incorrect assumptions.
SQL tables are independent of each other and if two tables have same column names then they will be stored separately and even they can have different definitions (eg: Table_1 & Table_2 have a common column name “date” which can have different meaning for both the tables), which is not the case in elastic mapping types. Internally, fields that have same names in different mapping types are stored as same Lucene field, having said that, it implies that both the fields should have the same mapping definition. This breaks the analogy mentioned above.
So in order to break this analogy ES6.x doesn’t allow more than one mapping type for an index. Even they are planning to remove _type in the upcoming versions.
Question: How you’re going to differentiate documents for the same index then?
Answer: You can do this in the following ways:
- Add a custom field type in the index definition.
- Make a separate index for each type.
