title: Multiple term searches in elasticsearch vs. RDBMS
body: <h3>The status quo with RDBMS</h3>
  
  <p>Say I have a legacy RDBMS table with 30-40 columns in it in an enterprise environment that is primarily used for search purposes.  In real life there may be several tables, but let's keep it simple.  I have dozens, maybe even hundreds of different programs each executing their own queries against this table, each looking at a slightly different set of fields.</p>
  
  <h3>Why the status quo hurts</h3>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Our DBAs work their tails off trying to ensure all of these different queries work well by tailoring indexes to work for each of them.  </li>
  <li>Distrust brews between developers and DBAs because DBAs want to know what new queries will be executed so they can check their indexes and developers just want to push new features as fast as they can.  </li>
  <li>Point 2 sometimes boils over into efforts to force developers to use all statically bound queries so that DBAs are sure to have a chance to evaluate performance first.  </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Ugh...</p>
  
  <h3>How does this compare to an ES index?</h3>
  
  <p>So assuming I index all 30-40 columns in an elasticsearch index, is it true that I can search either just one term or many in a way that is roughly as performant as a set of RDBMS indexes?</p>