using elastic-search as database in django

Question

I want to use elastic-search as database in my project which I build on django framework. As I learn, elastic search is used with together a database through haystack where elastic-search is used for only indexing and fast retrieval issues. Here it is explained how to integrate a database and elastic-search with haystack However, I would like to use elastic-search without a database, in other words I will index all data. I did not see anything like below that you can use elastic-search as database backend in django settings module.

# settings.py
DATABASES = {
'default': {
    'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
    'OPTIONS': {
        'read_default_file': '/path/to/my.cnf',
    },
}

}

Is not it possible to use only elastic-search with model layer of django? Here is the django-elasticsearch backend and in the examples section it does in the way I would like to do but I do not know whether it is storing first in a database and indexing on elastic-search or just store and indexing on elastic-search.

Answer 1

I think the short answer to your question is "no." I looked into this a while ago, and found that there was a project to create an elasticsearch database engine (https://github.com/aparo/django-elasticsearch), but with a last commit in 2011, I would not think that it is viable with post 1.0 versions of ES, and possibly 1.6.x versions of Django.