ElasticSearch - Return Unique Values

You can use the terms aggregation.

{
"size": 0,
"aggs" : {
    "langs" : {
        "terms" : { "field" : "language",  "size" : 500 }
    }
}}

The size parameter within the aggregation specifies the maximum number of terms to include in the aggregation result. If you need all results, set this to a value that is larger than the number of unique terms in your data.

A search will return something like:

{
"took" : 16,
"timed_out" : false,
"_shards" : {
  "total" : 2,
  "successful" : 2,
  "failed" : 0
},
"hits" : {
"total" : 1000000,
"max_score" : 0.0,
"hits" : [ ]
},
"aggregations" : {
  "langs" : {
    "buckets" : [ {
      "key" : "10",
      "doc_count" : 244812
    }, {
      "key" : "11",
      "doc_count" : 136794
 
    }, {
      "key" : "12",
      "doc_count" : 32312
       } ]
    }
  }
}

if you want to get the first document for each language field unique value, you can do this:

{
 "query": {
    "match_all": {
    }
  },
  "collapse": {
    "field": "language.keyword",
    "inner_hits": {
    "name": "latest",
      "size": 1
    }
  }
}

I am looking for this kind of solution for my self as well. I found reference in terms aggregation.

So, according to that following is the proper solution.

{
"aggs" : {
    "langs" : {
        "terms" : { "field" : "language",  
                    "size" : 500 }
    }
}}

But if you ran into following error:

"error": {
        "root_cause": [
            {
                "type": "illegal_argument_exception",
                "reason": "Fielddata is disabled on text fields by default. Set fielddata=true on [fastest_method] in order to load fielddata in memory by uninverting the inverted index. Note that this can however use significant memory. Alternatively use a keyword field instead."
            }
        ]}

In that case, you have to add "KEYWORD" in the request, like following:

   {
    "aggs" : {
        "langs" : {
            "terms" : { "field" : "language.keyword",  
                        "size" : 500 }
        }
    }}