Managing bulk actions

Executing automatic operations on items via a single call is often the cause of a bottleneck if you need to index or delete thousands/millions of records: the best practice in this case is to execute a bulk action.

We have discussed bulk actions via the REST API in the Speeding up atomic operations (bulk) recipe in Chapter 4, Basic Operations.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

A Maven tool, or an IDE that natively supports it for Java programming such as Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA, must be installed.

The code of this recipe is in the chapter_14/nativeclient directory and the referred class is the BulkOperations.

How to do it...

For managing a bulk action, we will perform these steps:

1. We'll need to import the required classes to execute bulks via the native client:

           import org.elasticsearch.action.bulk.BulkRequestBuilder; 
     ...