Support pg_bm25 extension
We are heavy users of Postgres (and Neon) at Brevity and a new feature we’d love to support for our customers is a better search experience. We’re currently using trigram indexes and it’s ok but it would be awesome to have something more similar to elastic search. We are very excited about the pg_bm25 Postgres extension but then saddened to learn that it is somehow not compatible with Neon’s implementation of Postgres.
Is there something that could change on the pg_bm35 side or the Neon side that could make the two systems compatible? Or are they fundamentally incompatible?
Does Neon team have any thoughts or ideas on how to support search?
2 Replies
flat-fuchsiaOP•2y ago
My understanding that this extension is storing data in on the filesystem of compute (and not using postgres) which makes it incompatible with neon because file system of compute is ephemeral.
stormy-gold•2y ago
You've hit the nail on the head. Right now, we are fully focused on our GA. If that is a use case we eventually want to support, it would be at least after that, if not much later
Have you looked into logical replication into another Postgres provider that does support pg_bm25?
ParadeDB is the author right? Neon could be your primary that logically replicates the necessary tables into ParadeDB
Then you could use ParadeDB as a read-only partial replica that just answers search queries for you