I disagree, both from a programming and admin perspective, I found ES to be the easiest option. With ES, I don't have to explicitly create tables (indexes) ,I f

I disagree, both from a programming and admin perspective, I found ES to be the easiest option. With ES, I don't have to explicitly create tables (indexes) ,I find ES queries and results a lot easier to deal with. A single node ES cluster is easy to maintain, I mean, just give it enough ram and disk space and you shouldn't even have to think about it again. And if you want to visualize the data as an admin, you can slap kibana on it. You can even go a bit crazy here and feed ES your web server logs to have even better correlation for stats. ES also has a very simple testable backup proceee (as simple as a curl command!). To your point, it does feel like "using a cannon to kill a mosquito". But I still had a better experience with it than even sqlite.