Naming conventions for indices and aliases

IBM Business Automation Insights creates a structure of OpenSearch indices and aliases to store the documents that result from Flink job processing. This structure is compliant with OpenSearch rollover pattern (_rollover API).

Rules for Flink jobs

For each Flink job, the following rules apply.
  • Documents are always written to a single index, known as the active index.
  • Documents are always written through a dedicated write alias, which always point to the current active index.
  • Documents are always queried from all indices, namely the active index and all the inactive indices that are created as part of a rollover operation.
  • Documents can be queried through a dedicated read alias, which always spans all active and inactive indices.

Naming conventions for indices

Index names must comply with the following rules.
  • Must be written in lowercase only.
  • Cannot include these characters: backslash (\), forward slash (/), question mark (?), double quotes ("), opening and closing angle brackets (< and >), pipe (|), space character, comma, sharp (#), colon (:).
  • Cannot start with a minus (-), underscore (_), or plus (+) sign.
  • Cannot contain more than 230 characters.