Transform uses a composite aggregation to page through the source. Benchmarks have shown that the executed ordinary searches slow down the ingest of the source. Due to transform a refresh is triggered more often than usual, causing the source ingest to do more work than without it.

By using a point in time reader, transform will prevent causing so much churn (benchmarks have shown a potential reduction of refreshes by 50%).

Requirements

• open a pit reader at the beginning of a new checkpoint
• use pit for all searches in the checkpoint
  • re-create a pit if necessary (e.g. timeout, start/stop)
  • don't fail due to a broken pit
  • keepAlive should be kept reasonably small
• explicitly delete the pit
  • after a checkpoint
  • on stop
• fallback to non pit mode, in case a node older 7.10 is part of the local or remote (CCS) cluster

Design considerations

Searches are executed by ClientTransformIndexer which inherits from TransformIndexer, adding the search capabilities given a client. This needs to be enhanced to create/destroy the pit object.

Future: Given checkpoints it will be possible to prune the search query/indices and e.g. avoid calling out to frozen/cold indices.