Are you referring to the real time flag? My understanding is that that is per shard and if you try to pull from another shard that hasn't updated its index, you

Are you referring to the real time flag? My understanding is that that is per shard and if you try to pull from another shard that hasn't updated its index, you'd get stale data. Maybe you are referring to something else or I am wrong about that? It doesn't change the larger point that using ES as your primary database is not playing to its strengths. You're better served using a transactional data store and building your indexes from that.