Hello Sam, You are a familiar name from my MITRE days :-)
Check out Solr's feature list and see how it compares to that of Postgres. If you are only doing the most basic default relevancy ranked top-N search with default text analysis, then the tech/maintenance overhead might not be worth it. I'm looking at this as such an example: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=solr On the other hand, if you want to ensure that you're able to make search the best it can be for your users, then keeping Solr and using it more will get you there; a database won't. To a database, full-text-search is just one checkbox of many concerns. The capabilities there are usually very simple. It's fine for a demo/POC -- getting started. One feature in particular I want to call out is faceting. To some apps, it's a game changer that can pivot the UX from merely having a basic search box to having navigation filters and everything else, at which point Solr is the foundation of what's driving the UX. I've seen people/apps miss this -- the user experience is so clumsy without it for rich/structured data in particular. If you've ever used a Maven repository manager like Nexus or it's competitors (last I checked), they are still stuck in the stone-age -- it's painful when you've been exposed to so much better. On the backend, if all you know is a database, you may not see how to make a faceting UI work because it's rather unnatural for SQL. Eric's response was great too. ~ David Smiley Apache Lucene/Solr Search Developer http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwsmiley On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 9:33 AM Bayer, Samuel <s...@mitre.org> wrote: > Hi all - > > In the interest of reducing my technology stack, I'm exploring whether > using Postgres full-text search instead of Solr might be an option when I > need both complex querying and full-text search. In my experience, so far, > Postgres can't compare to Solr, but I'm trying to understand why, in order > to have more of an ability to evaluate the functionality/complexity > tradeoffs. I know something about search technologies, but I'm not an > expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I've been looking for sources > that talk about the comparison in an informed way - people, blogs, > articles. So far, everything I've found is extremely basic. Does anyone > have any pointers for me? > > Thanks in advance - > Sam Bayer > The MITRE Corporation > s...@mitre.org >
