title: Elastic search full text vs mysql full text?
body: <p>I am trying to implement search functionality in my laravel app. Angolia is not preferred by my supervisors due to data security problems. Other than that one good option is to implement elastic search and another is to use full text search from mysql. I am not sure what are the pros and cons and although I have read in a few places that elastic search should be the better alternative, I would like to understand what I am working with since I haven't worked with searching before this.</p>
  
  <p>I am looking at MySQL requirements and it seems I can only implement it with 5.6 or above with InnoDb engine. And other than that I can only implement fulltext indexes on char and text type fields. I am not sure what kind of fields are permitted in Elastic search.</p>
  
  <p>I know I have to something like: </p>
  
  <pre><code>DB::statement('ALTER TABLE posts ADD FULLTEXT search(title, body)');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then I guess I do something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT * FROM posts
  WHERE MATCH (title, body)
  AGAINST ('foo' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there Eloquent implementation for this or do I have to do this manually using the DB facade? If there isn't a Eloquent implementation, are there 3rd party packages with this functionality?</p>
  
  <p>Other than that, I actually have to search in related tables too like comments and tags and so on. How is it possible to create indexes across tables or is it not possible? Is there anything in ES in which I can over come this if it is not possible to create indexes across tables in MySQL.</p>
  
  <p>What are the other pros and cons I might face using MySQL full text searches against elastic search?</p>