This Week in Elasticsearch - 2020-02-21

Elasticsearch has introduced improvements to enhance feature parity between Prefix Trees and BKD-backed geo_shapes, addressing limitations in multi-point and distance queries, which are vital for geospatial applications. A recent PR in Elasticsearch now allows multi-point queries with BKD-backed geo_shapes, enabling users to query multiple discrete points like cafes in a city or flu outbreaks across countries. Similarly, a PR in Lucene has added distance query capabilities to LatLonShape and XYShape, expanding the potential to perform common operations like identifying all values within a specified radius. Additionally, Elasticsearch has unveiled the Painless Lab, a new tool for experimenting with Painless scripts, offering immediate feedback, improved user interface, and extensive documentation links to enhance user proficiency in areas like Watcher and ingest node pipelines. The update also includes enhancements in S3 repository compatibility, providing options for region and signer algorithm overrides to support a broader range of third-party S3 implementations, such as Ceph and Minio configurations, although full support is not guaranteed.