How to use Elastic Search on top of a pre-existing SQL Database?

elasticsearch, javascript, json, php, sql

Solution

I am using jdbc-river w/ mysql. It is very fast. You can configure them to continually poll data, or use one-time (one-shot strategy) imports.

e.g.

curl -xPUT http://es-server:9200/_river/my_river/_meta -d '
{
    "type" : "jdbc",
    "jdbc" : {
        "strategy" : "simple",
        "poll" : "5s",
        "scale" : 0,
        "autocommit" : false,
        "fetchsize" : 10,
        "max_rows" : 0,
        "max_retries" : 3,
        "max_retries_wait" : "10s",
        "driver" : "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver",
        "url" : "jdbc:mysql://mysql-server:3306/mydb",
        "user" : "root",
        "password" : "password*",
        "sql" : "select c.id, c.brandCode, c.companyCode from category c"
    },
    "index" : {
        "index" : "mainIndex",
        "type" : "category",
        "bulk_size" : 30,
        "max_bulk_requests" : 100,
        "index_settings" : null,
        "type_mapping" : null,
        "versioning" : false,
        "acknowledge" : false
    }
}'

Problem

I've been reading through a lot of good documentation about how to implement Elastic Search on a website with javascript or PHP. Very good introduction to ES. Very complete documentation here and here. A whole CRUD. Elastic search with PHP: here, here, and here. So the reason why I'm giving you those URLs is to understand how to use one or many of those great documentations when having a pre-existing SQL DB. I'm missing the point somewhere: As they said Elasticsearch will create its own indexes and DB with MongoDB, I don't understand how can I use my (gigantic) database using SQL? Let say I have a MySQL DB, and I would like to use Elasticsearch to make my research faster and to propose the user pre-made queries, how do I do that? How does ES works over/along MySQL? How to transfer this gigantic set of Datas (over 8GB) into ES DB in order to be fully efficient at the beginning? Many Thanks

Original source