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Elasticsearch-Quality Full-Text Search in Postgres via Tantivy

Talkat POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 · 2025-06-10..06-12· [databases]
slides:none on file

Demonstrates a Postgres extension, pg_search, that embeds the Tantivy search engine (built in Rust with pgrx) to add BM25 scoring, richer tokenization, fast faceting and analytics, and a SQL-accessible score projection. Implements a new @@@ operator, a custom BM25 index (one index per table), predicate pushdown, and columnar “fast” fields so COUNT and facets run orders of magnitude faster; uses paradedb.score() to return BM25 values and claims Tantivy twice as fast as Lucene for the core search work.

AI-written summary · about

  1. 0:00Introduction
  2. 2:50About ParadeDB
  3. 4:58About is Full Text Search (FTS)
  4. 11:25What Postgres Full Text Search is missing
  5. 13:54What is BM25?
  6. 16:02Introducing pg_search
  7. 16:42About Tantivy
  8. 18:25How pg_search improves full text search
  9. 25:41How pg_search improves aggregates/facets
  10. 27:24Use cases and conclusion
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