Your Elasticsearch query returns the top 10 results. But what if the real top result is missing entirely? Here's why.
#1about 7 minutes
Understanding the CAP theorem for distributed systems
The CAP theorem states that a distributed data store can only provide two of three guarantees: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.
#2about 3 minutes
Introducing the FAB theory for datastore tradeoffs
The FAB theory proposes another set of tradeoffs for data stores, where you can only pick two of three attributes: fast, accurate, or big.
#3about 7 minutes
How terms aggregation trades accuracy for speed
Elasticsearch's terms aggregation may return inaccurate counts by default because each shard only considers its top local results to improve performance.
#4about 8 minutes
Inconsistent relevance scores in distributed full-text search
Full-text search relevance scores using TF-IDF can be inconsistent because inverse document frequency is calculated per-shard, not globally.
#5about 2 minutes
Using a single shard to ensure data accuracy
Forcing an index to use a single shard guarantees accurate aggregations and relevance scores by eliminating distributed calculations, but sacrifices horizontal scaling.
#6about 1 minute
Why you must consciously choose your data tradeoffs
It is crucial to understand and explicitly choose the tradeoffs in your data systems, like those in the CAP and FAB theorems, to avoid unexpected behavior.
Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
The Web We Broke (And Why AI Agents Are Paying the Price) - AgentCon BerlinThis is the accompanying post to the talk Chris Heilmann gave at AgentCon in Berlin on 19/05/2026, you can also see the slides and listen to it in this screencast:
Thirty years of developer shortcuts, bloated JavaScript, and inaccessible HTML have l...
Dilek Demir
Data Science & more: The Lopez dilemmaCatwalk, Data Science, Hollywood, Google Images, Haute Couture, StackOverflow, Comfort Zone, Dota 2 and Versace – all these topics are connected and influenced by each other. Read here how and why!In 2000 Jennifer Lopez's green Versace dress went vi...
46:58
41:51
22:41
27:27
30:34
24:22
29:25
39:39
