postgres-elasticsearch-fdw VS Toshi

My experience with Postgres FTS (did a comparison with Elastic a couple years back), is that filtering works fine and is speedy enough, but ranking crumbles when the resulting set is large.

If you have a large-ish data set with lots of similar data (4M addresses and location names was the test case), Postgres FTS just doesn't perform.

There is no index that helps scoring results. You would have to install an extension like RUM index (https://github.com/postgrespro/rum) to improve this, which may or may not be an option (often not if you use managed databases).

If you want a best of both worlds, one could investigate this extensions (again, often not an option for managed databases): https://github.com/matthewfranglen/postgres-elasticsearch-fd...

Either way, writing something that indexes your postgres database into elastic/opensearch is a one time investment that usually pays off in the long run.

I used a foreign data wrapper to query elasticsearch indexes from within postgres.[0]

It pushed alot of complexity down away from higher-level app developers not familiar with ES patterns.

[0]: https://github.com/matthewfranglen/postgres-elasticsearch-fd...

I don't think you have an active project that addresses all those use cases. There was an attempt in Rust with Toshi that is built on top of tantivy, but the project seems to have stalled.

I wish we had an extension like ZomboDB but using a lighter search engine like https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit, https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi and https://github.com/mosuka/bayard

Here I'm listing engines based on https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy - tantivy is comparable to Lucene in its scope - but I'm sure there are other engines that could tackle ElasticSearch.

Another thing that could happen is maybe directly embed tantivy in Postgres using an extension, perhaps this could be an option too.

I do something similar, though I index the page myself via a little browser extension I wrote. I click a button, the content gets POSTed to a server that throws it in Toshi[1]. I hacked it together on a Saturday, and it's been pretty handy; as you describe, much more useful than any bookmarking approach I've tried before.

[1] https://github.com/toshi-search/Toshi

There is some incredible work being done in the web department, frameworks like rocket.rs and actix.rs are amazing. To get the latest info on web development in Rust, check arewewebyet.org. It doesn't list Toshi though, which is weird.