Ivan Cesar gives us a brief tutorial of the Elasticsearch .NET API:
To be able to search something, we must store some data into ES. The term used is “indexing.”
The term “mapping” is used for mapping our data in the database to objects which will be serialized and stored in Elasticsearch. We will be using Entity Framework (EF) in this tutorial.
Generally, when using Elasticsearch, you are probably looking for a site-wide search engine solution. You will either use some sort of feed or digest, or Google-like search which returns all the results from various entities, such as users, blog entries, products, categories, events, etc.
These will probably not just be one table or entity in your database, but rather, you will want to aggregate diverse data and maybe extract or derive some common properties like title, description, date, author/owner, photo, and so on. Another thing is, you probably won’t do it in one query, but if you are using an ORM, you will have to write a separate query for each of those blog entries, users, products, categories, events, or something else.
Check out Ivan’s tutorial for several examples. Elasticsearch is really good for text-based search and simple aggregations, but it probably shouldn’t be a primary data store for any data you really care about.