Philippe Noël

At long last, @chris.blue and I have submitted the final manuscript of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, second edition, to the publisher. There is always more that could be improved but at some point we just have to call it done. Now it goes into production; probably shipping in ~4 months.

nice post :)

My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character These methods have helped me enormously—and can save you much heartache and anxiety

This morning, I found myself re-reading this article by The Honest Broker on evaluating character. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend you do. It's an incredibly distilled set of principles that has benefited me immensely in life. Intemporal advice.

www.honest-broker.com/p/my-8-best-...

Classic

I saw this on LinkedIn and it was just too accurate to not share here. Postgres powers so much of the world's software yet the core team is a couple dozen people. The ecosystem around it is also surprisingly small for how far reaching it is.

Couldn't agree more. This is also what we're seeing at ParadeDB

They grow up so fast: donating your open source project to a foundation (or: the CloudNativePG story) The first commit to the CloudNativePG project was made in February 2020. Just two years later, EDB...

Floor Drees summarized the talk she gave a PGConf EU with CloudNativePG maintainer Gabriele Bartolini last week, titled "They grow up so fast: donating your open source project to a foundation".

In case you're curious about the project's origin story: dev.to/floord/they-... #Postgres #Kubernetes

ClickHouse® vs ParadeDB: Can the parade keep up? Compare ClickHouse vs ParadeDB for analytics workloads: architecture differences, performance benchmarks, scaling capabilities, and migration guidance.

The conclusions aren't all 100% right here, but I was quite surprised to see us picked up by Tinybird. Must be doing something right

www.tinybird.co/blog/clickho...

Learning SEO optimization is kinda fun

I'm at PGConf EU in Riga this week. If you're around, come say hi!

All good, I think we're still a step before doing that

I'm interested in hiring an "SEO consultant" to come in, evaluate our SEO posture and make a list of recommendations for what to improve next. Got anyone to recommend?

ParadeDB The Transactional Elasticsearch Alternative Built on Postgres

Had a few folks ask why you'd need ACID for search. This @paradedb.bsky.social article from @philippemnoel.bsky.social and company does a decent job making the case.

There are a lot of cases (e.g. fintech) where strong consistency and durability is a big deal for search.

no clue

EFCore.ParadeDB.PgSearch 0.1.0 EFCore.ParadeDB.PgSearch adds ParadeDB's pg_search extension support to Npgsql.EntityFrameworkCore.PostgreSQL. Exposes ParadeDB search functions through EF.Functions API for LINQ-based full-text searc...

There's a ParadeDB pg_search package for the .NET! Kudos to Nandor on this one. Source and package manager links:

- www.nuget.org/packages/EFC...
- github.com/nandor23/EFC...

I just try not to run too many apps at the same time now :(

So annoying. Need the next update to fix this haha

An excellent, to-the-point blog post. One architecture difference to note is that MongoDB Search runs outside of the main MongoDB process, while in ParadeDB it runs inside.

We've revamping our tokenizers and will fix this emoji tokenization issue. Thanks Franck!

Is it just me or the new macOS Liquid GLass Spotlight is kinda laggy... Ugh (On M3 MacBook Air)

YouTube video by The Data Engineering Show - Podcast Postgres vs. Elasticsearch: Instacart’s Unexpected Winner in High-Stakes Search with Ankit Mittal

A fantastic podcast by our engineer, Ankit Mittal, on how Instacart built search on Postgres, where the future of search infrastructure is going, and why that led him to join us at ParadeDB: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hohp...

What is your take on Elasticsearch shipping a SQL interface?

I'm not as familiar with this use case, but I don't see how this couldn't be declared as SQL.

We came up with this categorization internally:

- real-time search (e.g. dashboards, SaaS search boxes)
- observability
- RAG/GenAI

Instacart can know this because they have recommender systems trained on what this user might want.

But I don't think all search use cases need this. I suspect AI-search use cases will to a lesser extent, but that it'll be beneficial for them. That's more likely to be an area we optimize around.

By arbitrary, you mean custom code / ML models? I think these matter a lot in a use case like e-commerce where a lot of domain knowledge and user-specific knowledge is applied. For example, an Instacart user might type "banana" but they want "banana yogurt" rather than "bananas".

I think it's important to define the use cases well. ParadeDB is not focusing on e-commerce, and so we have a lower emphasis on re-ranking. Elastic has good capabilities there since they are so broad they target pretty much all search use cases.

How Instacart Built a Modern Search Infrastructure on Postgres Ankit Mittal, Vinesh Gudla, Guanghua Shu, Akshay Nair, Tejaswi Tenneti, Andrew Tanner

Blog post written by Ankit (who now works at ParadeDB) here: tech.instacart.com/how-instacar...

Thhey're very powerful, especially in e-commerce use cases. One of our engineers used to work on Instacart's search team. Their use case fits exactly what you describe -- Heavy emphasis on re-ranking and ML models and somewhat limited emphasis on keyword relevance. They're built on Postgres and SQL

ParadeDB has somewhat limited re-ranking capabilities today, but that hasn't stopped our customers from seeing value and I expect we'll be improving our re-ranking capabilities heavily in 2026.

I agree that re-ranking is important once you enter use cases where result relevance at the margins is critical. For example, Best Buy might be interested in a marginal relevance improvement given the sheer volume of sales they process.

But for many, a simple Top K and fast sort/ordering is enough