Elasticsearch supports partial document updates:

This might come in handy in cases where:

1) we know exactly what will change in the document
2) some fields are very expensive to generate (for instance with Tika)

It's a bit hard to say when condition #1 is reached right now, because:

• a bridge may not declare all the fields it can generate (for instance with dynamic mapping)
• multiple bridges may affect the same field

Maybe we can remove those grey areas in Hibernate Search 6.

Note: we may want to consider this feature for the Lucene integration, too.