title: Elastic vs DB for regular search?
body: <p>I have joined a new company where I observed the below use case.</p>
  
  <p>Use case :- A table has around 500 GB of data. Data is user action events for each and every user activity. Purpose is to analyse the activity count
  for different permutation and combination for any given date range. So data is further supplied to elastic(and lucene in different similar scenario use case).</p>
  
  <p>My understanding is for this kind of scenario DB in itself should be sufficient.But When I try to query the DB for specific permutation and combination for given data range its damn slow and most of the time gets times out.</p>
  
  <p>But when I to fetch same combination with elastic(or lucene), it is much faster. There is no full text search support required here.</p>
  
  <p>Not sure what is causing the elastic(or lucene) to be much faster than SQL based DB even for regular(not full text) search ?</p>
  
  <p>what can be the probable reason for the same ? I can think of two reasons here </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Elastic(or lucene) keeps the data in compressed form. So may be it is quicker to search here ?</li>
  <li>Elastic may help to achieve the parallelism with data kept in multiple shards by default. But in lucene  case tI do not even see any parallelism.</li>
  </ol>