A workaround to get term query results from a match query against an unmapped Elasticsearch index

We ran into a situation where the responses we were getting back from our elasticsearch queries against a particular instance seemed like nonsense.

However, in order to do that properly required some architectural work and planning so that someone wasn’t going to have to ssh into each elasticsearch instance and manually run a reindexing script.

As a result, we needed to find a short term way to get the right results using the existing index with the missing mapping.

The query at fault was a match query:

The reason the query was failing is because the value of the field we were searching for contained a lot of hyphens. As a result, in the absence of a mapping telling elasticsearch not to analyze the document, elasticsearch’s default behavior is to split that string up on the hyphens and store the document by treating the value of that field as a collection of the chunks separated by the hyphens in the “inverted index”.

There are obviously performance issues with this approach, but as a way to get our customers the information they are expecting in the short term, it was good enough.

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