That's part of it, but not the whole picture. For example, we mostly bypass the ES query engine and go directly to Lucene. Queries are not simply translated to ES query syntax. Also, we've done a lot more work than simply pasting an SQL layer over the top. We've built streaming BLOB support, a distributed SQL layer with real-time MapReduce, and a distributed aggregation engine that gives accurate results for aggregations rather than HLL estimates.
If you'd like we're happy to answer any questions in IRC or our Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/crateio IRC Freenode #crate: irc://irc.freenode.net/crate @mention anyone with Voice