Elasticsearch-Quality Full-Text Search in Postgres via Tantivy | POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025

Video of a conference talk in which the first part of the talk will start with describing the current support for full-text search in Postgres. We'll then discuss what is missing (BM25, tokenization, facets, performance gaps) and why it needs to be better. In the second part of the talk, we'll discuss how we solve these limitations by integrating Tantivy, an Apache Lucene-inspired library, into a Postgres extension named pg_search. We will then conclude with some examples and areas for future work by the community. Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, a Postgres-based startup building search and analytics capabilities inside Postgres. Philippe is originally from Québec, Canada, studied computer science at Harvard, and previously worked at Microsoft on Azure Windows Server and at Whist, a browser cybersecurity startup. ► Video bookmarks: ⏩ 00:00 Introduction ⏩ 02:50 About ParadeDB ⏩ 04:58 About is Full Text Search (FTS) ⏩ 11:25 What Postgres Full Text Search is missing ⏩ 13:54 What is BM25? ⏩ 16:02 Introducing pg_search ⏩ 16:42 About Tantivy ⏩ 18:25 How pg_search improves full text search ⏩ 25:41 How pg_search improves aggregates/facets ⏩ 27:24 Use cases and conclusion Resources: https://postgresql.life/post/philippe_noel/ https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb 📕 Everything you need to know about POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 can be found at: https://posetteconf.com ✅ Learn more: Watch more POSETTE talks: https://aka.ms/posette-playlist 📌 Let’s connect:   LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/posetteconf/ X – @PosetteConf, https://twitter.com/PosetteConf Mastodon – @posetteconf, https://mastodon.social/@posetteconf Bluesky – @posetteconf.com, https://bsky.app/profile/posetteconf.com _________________________________ #PosetteConf #PostgreSQL #databases