Keyword type family

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The keyword family includes the following field types:

  • keyword, which is used for structured content such as IDs, email addresses, hostnames, status codes, zip codes, or tags.
  • constant_keyword for keyword fields that always contain the same value.
  • wildcard for unstructured machine-generated content. The wildcard type is optimized for fields with large values or high cardinality.

Keyword fields are often used in sorting, aggregations, and term-level queries, such as term.

Avoid using keyword fields for full-text search. Use the text field type instead.

Keyword field type

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Below is an example of a mapping for a basic keyword field:

PUT my-index-000001
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "tags": {
        "type":  "keyword"
      }
    }
  }
}

Mapping numeric identifiers

Not all numeric data should be mapped as a numeric field data type. Elasticsearch optimizes numeric fields, such as integer or long, for range queries. However, keyword fields are better for term and other term-level queries.

Identifiers, such as an ISBN or a product ID, are rarely used in range queries. However, they are often retrieved using term-level queries.

Consider mapping a numeric identifier as a keyword if:

  • You don’t plan to search for the identifier data using range queries.
  • Fast retrieval is important. term query searches on keyword fields are often faster than term searches on numeric fields.

If you’re unsure which to use, you can use a multi-field to map the data as both a keyword and a numeric data type.

Parameters for basic keyword fields

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The following parameters are accepted by keyword fields:

boost
Mapping field-level query time boosting. Accepts a floating point number, defaults to 1.0.
doc_values
Should the field be stored on disk in a column-stride fashion, so that it can later be used for sorting, aggregations, or scripting? Accepts true (default) or false.
eager_global_ordinals
Should global ordinals be loaded eagerly on refresh? Accepts true or false (default). Enabling this is a good idea on fields that are frequently used for terms aggregations.
fields
Multi-fields allow the same string value to be indexed in multiple ways for different purposes, such as one field for search and a multi-field for sorting and aggregations.
ignore_above
Do not index any string longer than this value. Defaults to 2147483647 so that all values would be accepted. Please however note that default dynamic mapping rules create a sub keyword field that overrides this default by setting ignore_above: 256.
index
Should the field be searchable? Accepts true (default) or false.
index_options
What information should be stored in the index, for scoring purposes. Defaults to docs but can also be set to freqs to take term frequency into account when computing scores.
meta
Metadata about the field.
norms
Whether field-length should be taken into account when scoring queries. Accepts true or false (default).
null_value
Accepts a string value which is substituted for any explicit null values. Defaults to null, which means the field is treated as missing. Note that this cannot be set if the script value is used.
on_script_error
Defines what to do if the script defined by the script parameter throws an error at indexing time. Accepts fail (default), which will cause the entire document to be rejected, and continue, which will register the field in the document’s _ignored metadata field and continue indexing. This parameter can only be set if the script field is also set.
script
If this parameter is set, then the field will index values generated by this script, rather than reading the values directly from the source. If a value is set for this field on the input document, then the document will be rejected with an error. Scripts are in the same format as their runtime equivalent. Values emitted by the script are normalized as usual, and will be ignored if they are longer that the value set on ignore_above.
store
Whether the field value should be stored and retrievable separately from the _source field. Accepts true or false (default).
similarity
Which scoring algorithm or similarity should be used. Defaults to BM25.
normalizer
How to pre-process the keyword prior to indexing. Defaults to null, meaning the keyword is kept as-is.
split_queries_on_whitespace
Whether full text queries should split the input on whitespace when building a query for this field. Accepts true or false (default).
time_series_dimension

[preview] This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. (Optional, Boolean)

For internal use by Elastic only.

Marks the field as a time series dimension. Defaults to false.

The index.mapping.dimension_fields.limit index setting limits the number of dimensions in an index.

Dimension fields have the following constraints:

  • The doc_values and index mapping parameters must be true.
  • Field values cannot be an array or multi-value.
  • Field values cannot be larger than 1024 bytes.
  • The field cannot use a normalizer.

Constant keyword field type

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Constant keyword is a specialization of the keyword field for the case that all documents in the index have the same value.

PUT logs-debug
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "@timestamp": {
        "type": "date"
      },
      "message": {
        "type": "text"
      },
      "level": {
        "type": "constant_keyword",
        "value": "debug"
      }
    }
  }
}

constant_keyword supports the same queries and aggregations as keyword fields do, but takes advantage of the fact that all documents have the same value per index to execute queries more efficiently.

It is both allowed to submit documents that don’t have a value for the field or that have a value equal to the value configured in mappings. The two below indexing requests are equivalent:

POST logs-debug/_doc
{
  "date": "2019-12-12",
  "message": "Starting up Elasticsearch",
  "level": "debug"
}

POST logs-debug/_doc
{
  "date": "2019-12-12",
  "message": "Starting up Elasticsearch"
}

However providing a value that is different from the one configured in the mapping is disallowed.

In case no value is provided in the mappings, the field will automatically configure itself based on the value contained in the first indexed document. While this behavior can be convenient, note that it means that a single poisonous document can cause all other documents to be rejected if it had a wrong value.

Before a value has been provided (either through the mappings or from a document), queries on the field will not match any documents. This includes exists queries.

The value of the field cannot be changed after it has been set.

Parameters for constant keyword fields

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The following mapping parameters are accepted:

meta

Metadata about the field.

value

The value to associate with all documents in the index. If this parameter is not provided, it is set based on the first document that gets indexed.

Wildcard field type

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The wildcard field type is a specialized keyword field for unstructured machine-generated content you plan to search using grep-like wildcard and regexp queries. The wildcard type is optimized for fields with large values or high cardinality.

Internally the wildcard field indexes the whole field value using ngrams and stores the full string. The index is used as a rough filter to cut down the number of values that are then checked by retrieving and checking the full values. This field is especially well suited to run grep-like queries on log lines. Storage costs are typically lower than those of keyword fields but search speeds for exact matches on full terms are slower. If the field values share many prefixes, such as URLs for the same website, storage costs for a wildcard field may be higher than an equivalent keyword field.

You index and search a wildcard field as follows

PUT my-index-000001
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "my_wildcard": {
        "type": "wildcard"
      }
    }
  }
}

PUT my-index-000001/_doc/1
{
  "my_wildcard" : "This string can be quite lengthy"
}

GET my-index-000001/_search
{
  "query": {
    "wildcard": {
      "my_wildcard": {
        "value": "*quite*lengthy"
      }
    }
  }
}

Parameters for wildcard fields

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The following parameters are accepted by wildcard fields:

null_value

Accepts a string value which is substituted for any explicit null values. Defaults to null, which means the field is treated as missing.

ignore_above

Do not index any string longer than this value. Defaults to 2147483647 so that all values would be accepted.

Limitations

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  • wildcard fields are untokenized like keyword fields, so do not support queries that rely on word positions such as phrase queries.
  • When running wildcard queries any rewrite parameter is ignored. The scoring is always a constant score.