Teaching Postgres to Facet Like Elasticsearch

1 comments

• jamesgresql 3 days ago
  Hey HN! Author here. We added faceted search capabilities to our `pg_search` extension for Postgres, which is built on Tantivy (Rust's answer to Lucene). This brings Elasticsearch-style faceting directly into Postgres with a 14x performance improvement over a CTE based approach by performing facet aggregations in a single BM25 index pass and making use of our columnar store.

  You get the same faceting features you'd expect from a dedicated search engine while maintaining full ACID compliance. Happy to answer technical questions about the implementation!

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  • PSeitz 3 days ago
    Hi, tantivy dev here. There are two recent performance improvements in tantivy, which should make term aggregations considerable faster.

    https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy/pull/2740 https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy/pull/2759

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    • stuhood 2 days ago
      Yes, thank you for your hard work! We rebased recently, and we'll likely talk about those improvements as part of our `0.21.x` release.