# What is Siren Federate (Elasticsearch Plugin)

**URL:** <https://community.siren.io/t/what-is-siren-federate-elasticsearch-plugin/20>\
**Category:** Siren Federate (Elasticsearch Plugin)\
**Created:** [March 29, 2019, 4:25pm UTC](https://community.siren.io/t/what-is-siren-federate-elasticsearch-plugin/20 "2019-03-29T16:25:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jccq](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex032/user_avatar/community.siren.io/jccq/32/12_2.png) [@jccq](https://community.siren.io/u/jccq)\
**Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 4:25pm UTC](https://community.siren.io/t/what-is-siren-federate-elasticsearch-plugin/20/1 "2019-03-29T16:25:00Z")

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Siren Federate is a plug in for Elasticsearch which enhances new or existing clusters with:

- Distributed relational joins across Elasticsearch indexes
- Virtualization of remote JDBC and other datasources into “Virtual Elasticsearch” indexes (so that Investigate or other clients can see these sources as if the data was in Elasticsearch - for a good number of use cases). A Virtual index works by rewriting queries into the remote backend language.
- Reflection jobs - Jobs that ingest data from remote datasources to local indexes and keep them refreshed on a regular basis.

All of the above have APIs which are used by Siren Investigate but can be used by other applications.

For more information see our [blog post](https://siren.io/beyond-perfect-search-introduction-and-benchmark-of-the-siren-federate-engine/). Or Siren Federate [documentation](http://docs.siren.io).