We're pleased to announce that Elasticsearch 6.2.2 is now available on Compose for new deployments and upgrading users. Compose Elasticsearch users can also upgrade today to get all the 6.0 and 6.2 features and enhancements.

What's in Elasticsearch 6 and 6.2

Elasticsearch 6 brought many enhancements to the infrastructure of Elasticsearch to deliver a more reliable and performant search platform. Query times are quicker with sorted indices and sparse fields are significantly smaller. There's also new significant_text aggregation, an IPv6 aware ip_range field type, icu_collation keywords and the removal of the _all keyword.

The subsequent Elasticsearch 6.2 also added a ranking evaluation API, support for Well Known Text in geospatial data and default "safe" search settings to stop accidental overwhelming Elasticsearch.

The release announcements for Elasticsearch 6.0 and 6.2 have more details of the features but do note these details merge proprietary features from Elastic with the open source releases of Elasticsearch.

The end of Multitype Mapping

More importantly, and potentially affecting all users and developers with Elasticsearch 6, the end of multiple type mappings has come. Migrating from Elasticsearch 5 will allow existing indices to have multiple types mapped to the data within it, but new multi-type indices will not be able to be created. Elasticsearch's change is explained in Removal of mapping types in its documentation.

This is a major change and we recommend that users audit their current usage of Elasticsearch to ensure they aren't affected. The functionality will be completely removed in Elasticsearch 7.

Getting Elasticsearch 6

• New users can select version 6.2.2 of Elasticsearch when creating a new deployment.
• Existing users of Elasticsearch on Compose can follow our guide to upgrading and migrating. The quick version is to get from 5.x to 6.x can be done using Compose's Restore-from-Backup process which creates a new deployment with your data. The exception is if the 5.x Elasticsearch data has been migrated from an earlier Elasticsearch deployment. In that case, the indices from Elasticsearch 2.x will need to be recreated - instructions are in the documentation.

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attribution Paul Larkin