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Comment by retakeming | Hacker News Reader

Blog post author and one of the pg_bm25 contributors here. Super excited to see the interest in pg_bm25!

pg_bm25 is our first step in building an Elasticsearch alternative on Postgres. We built it as a result of working on hybrid search in Postgres and becoming frustrated with Postgres' sparse feature set when it comes to full text search.

To address a few of the discussion points, today pg_bm25 can be installed on self-hosted Postgres instances. Managed Postgres providers like RDS are pretty restrictive when it comes to the Postgres extension ecosystem, which is why we're currently working on a managed Postgres database called ParadeDB which comes with pg_bm25 preinstalled. It'll be available in private beta next week and there's a waitlist on our website (https://www.paradedb.com/).

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For what it's worth, the single biggest selling point to a better search, for me, would be not having to deal with additional infrastructure and all the hassle that comes with keeping data in sync. I would be very reluctant to move off of RDS/Aurora, and therefore have my principal motivation to use something like this is greatly negated.

I understand that it becomes very hard to monetize if you're not able to offer your own hosted service, and I don't have a solution for that, but not supporting RDS is going to really diminish the product for many people.

Our goal is for one day ParadeDB to be a viable alternative to AWS RDS/Aurora, so that like you say, you don't need to keep data in-sync and can just use one system (ParadeDB). Soon it will be possible for you to have ParadeDB running on your AWS (utilizing your cloud credits+all security/privacy guarantees) but be managed via the ParadeDB dashboard, similar to how Aurora works from a developer UX.

Of course if you are 100% attached to AWS RDS itself (rather than the convenience of AWS RDS, which is replicable by ParadeDB), then there's not much we can do here, as we also need to eat :')

Will you be providing this for bring-your-own-compute in general? There is a gaping hole in the market for this. All the big vendors that provide postgres as a service require you to be on very specific types of hosting like aws fargate, google gke etc (looking at you Crunchydata).

We are using Scaleway (french cloud) which is heaven when it comes to GDPR and Schrems compliance, but once we grow out of their managed db offerings or if we want something their managed db offering does not provide we are out of luck.

Been looking for a year more or less now and I am simply unable to find something that doesnt amount to us just paying a fraction of a consulting FTE to be our lightweight DBA. There are only so many ways you can set up postgres HA, it is amazing that no one has made a product out of doing it for someone else yet.

Hey! Absolutely, we would love to offer as many cloud providers as possible for our compute backend. We're starting with AWS, and will be adding other clouds based on demand. I've added Scaleway to our list, and if you'd like to help us bring ParadeDB to Scaleway we would love to work together to make it happen faster.

In the meantime, you can self-host ParadeDB on Scaleway directly by running the Docker container. Hope this helps!

Only one i know is elest.io

Yes, I have a similar feeling towards Cloud SQL for Postgres. Would be great if Azure/GCP would be supported in some manner

What are the features of RDS/Aurora that you need?

Also, it would be possible to set up a logical PG replica.

Being in my VPC, having the support and track record of AWS, scaling to 128TB without me having to think about it, easy snapshots/backups.

Could this also work as an alternative to Apache Solr? If so might be worth while to market it that way a bit.

I don't really know much about Solr but just started using it while helping with a project for openlibrary.org and it seems pretty alright but I'm still not totally sure I understand what makes it popular.

Solr and Elasticsearch are both Java servers built on top of the Java search library Lucene. There are plenty of articles on the internet describing how they differ. However since they share the same core, so they are very similar as well. For the context of this discussion, you can consider Solr & Elasticsearch as interchangeable - a potayto, potahto situation.

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