Elastic Enterprise Search - Is it a best practice to index data of two different json schema in a single index

Question

Hi I'm trying out Elastic Enterprise Search with Elasticsearch. I have a couple of questions on data indexing.

When referring to Elasticsearch documentation, I read that there is a limit to the number of fields that an Elasticsearch index could have. Since Elasticsearch is used with Elastic Enterprise Search I believe there is no arguing that the same applies here. In that case lets say I have multiple document types with various fields. For an example Person.json and Dog.json, they both have different properties. So when indexing I use one search engine in Elastic Enterprise Search to index both Person and Dog so that when I query using the Elastic Enterprise Search API I'll get results which are both Person and Dog depending on the search term.

Is this the way to go,or should I specify a seperate search engine for each schema type?

Answer 1

I am assuming that your person.json and dog.json contains different fields as your heading suggest and weather to create a separate index for these entities or have them in a single index, depends on the various use-cases you have in your application and you will not find elasticsearch marking one approach better than other and mainly will explain the pros/cons based on a particular context(like relevance, performance, management etc).

Please refer to my this SO answer, where I talked about various pros/cons of both the approach and discussion in chat to get more context why OP chose an approach based on his use-case, after knowing the pros/cons.