Prism: Why I built my own search engine

At some point at work I had to delete a large Elasticsearch index. Straightforward task, you&rsquo;d think. The index had grown out of control, nothing useful in it anymore, and it was eating disk. The problem was how you delete in Elasticsearch. delete_by_query doesn&rsquo;t just delete — it copies the data to a new index first, then removes the old one. So before you can delete your way out of a…