zombodb VS Toshi

And lots of interesting extensions use it, like

https://github.com/tembo-io/pgmq

https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb

https://github.com/supabase/pg_jsonschema

Point 2 is generally solvable via engineering effort and careful dedicated code. From the existing tools, PGSync is an open source project that aims to specifically solve this problem. ZomboDB is an interesting Postgres extension that tackles point 2 (and I think partially point 3), by controlling and querying Elasticsearch through Postgres. I haven't yet tried either of these two projects, so I can't comment on their trade-offs, but I wanted to mention them.

Curious, did you try zombodb? [https://www.zombodb.com/]

What about zombodb, do you think that quickwit has all the necessary APIs?

No. Haha. Was just the right name for https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb at the time. Software where the only limit is yourself!

> The hardest part of building any search engine is keeping the index up-to-date with changes made to the underlying data store.

This deserves mention, as it solves that problem: https://github.com/zombodb/zombodb

From the README:

> ZomboDB brings powerful text-search and analytics features to Postgres by using Elasticsearch as an index type. Its comprehensive query language and SQL functions enable new and creative ways to query your relational data.

> From a technical perspective, ZomboDB is a 100% native Postgres extension that implements Postgres' Index Access Method API. As a native Postgres index type, ZomboDB allows you to CREATE INDEX ... USING zombodb on your existing Postgres tables. At that point, ZomboDB takes over and fully manages the remote Elasticsearch index and guarantees transactionally-correct text-search query results.

I find other things also hard in search engines: dealing with the plethora of human languages and all the requirements we may have to processing them. A mature solution like ES therefor is almost a must in the more demanding cases.

You can read more about it on our GitHub repo, but basically it brings most of the power of elasticsearch’s searching and analytics abilities straight into Postgres.

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.