Top all-time · #2841
ParadeDB
Company blog · paradedb.com/blogdataprogrammingsystems
ParadeDB is the company blog at paradedb.com, writing about data, programming and systems. Since 2023, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 79 times, most often “A New Postgres Block Storage Layout for Full Text Search”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link ParadeDB's blog as a reference for Postgres search, including BM25 and full-text search, block storage, LSM trees, Iceberg and hybrid search. Comments mostly cite posts rather than judge them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Just use Postgres. ParadeDB makes text and vector search, filters, facets, and joins fast in Postgres. Home of the pg_search extension.
Most-linked posts?
- A New Postgres Block Storage Layout for Full Text Search7 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2025-01-17
- ParadeDB: Search and analytics for Postgres with zero ETL7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-10-08
- We made Postgres writes faster, but it broke replication4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-06-30
- The Missing Manual for Hybrid Search in PostgreSQL3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-08
- Elasticsearch Was Never a Database3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-18
- Teaching Postgres to Facet Like Elasticsearch2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-14
- The making of a search engine: A conversation with the creator of Tantivy2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-04-07
- Logical replication is underrated alt to ELT2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-14
- /blog/introducing-search2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-09-19
- Retrieve and rerank: personalized search without leaving Postgres2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-25
What Hacker News says?
I agree with the author - introducing a vector database often isn't worth the extra complexity. Personally, I can vouch for ParadeDB: https://www.paradedb.com/ It adds extra extensions to PostgreSQL which enable vector indexing, full text search and BM25. Works great and developers are helpful! The major difference is that you must generate the embeddings by yourself, but I consider it an upside - to each their own…
Comment linking /
on “Vector databases are the wrong abstraction”Submitted We made Postgres writes faster, but it broke replication as a story · 250 points
HN discussionThe segments themselves being immutable doesn't mean that Tantivy is incompatible with Postgres - it just means that Tantivy needs to be made compatible with Postgres' concurrency control mechanisms (MVCC) and storage format (block storage). This blog post explains the latter: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/block_storage_part_one
Comment linking /blog/block_storage_part_one
on “PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)”Submitted From text to token: How tokenization pipelines work as a story · 134 points
HN discussionParadeDB | https://paradedb.com | SF Onsite + Remote | Full-Time | Rust Database Engineers ParadeDB is an alternative to Elasticsearch built on Postgres. We're building a Postgres extension in Rust that offers a new index type optimized for full-text search and aggregate/analytics workloads. We solve three problems with Elasticsearch today: - Lack of read-after-writes guarantees - Lack of JOINs - Infrastructure comp…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)”Submitted ParadeDB Search Performance Improvements as a story · 69 points
HN discussionI think you forgot to add the links Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is a great feature of open source) Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open helps Datadog's bottom line?
Comment linking /blog/introducing_search
on “Datadog acquires Quickwit”Submitted Solving Postgres' Count Problem as a story · 41 points
HN discussionThat's true for the kernel, How about extensions such as ParadeDB BM25 https://www.paradedb.com/ + PGroonga https://pgroonga.github.io/ + PG Bigm https://github.com/pgbigm/pg_bigm ?
Comment linking /
on “Postgres is eating the database world”Submitted A New Postgres Block Storage Layout for Full Text Search as a story · 21 points
HN discussionParadeDB (YC S23, https://paradedb.com ) | Database Internals Engineers, Platform Engineers | Remote or hybrid in San Francisco | Full-time ParadeDB is a Postgres extension that delivers state-of-the-art search in Postgres. Our customers, including Alibaba Cloud, BILT Rewards, Modern Treasury (YC S18), and many others, rely on us to deliver the performance and feature set of dedicated vector databases/Elasticsearch…
Comment linking /blog
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)”Submitted A New Postgres Block Storage Layout for Full Text Search as a story · 13 points
HN discussionHow so? Many popular projects are AGPL. MinIO, Grafana, etc. We wrote about this here: https://www.paradedb.com/blog/agpl
Comment linking /blog/agpl
on “We made Postgres writes faster, but it broke replication”Submitted Elasticsearch Was Never a Database as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThanks for the questions! After reading I don’t get how locks held in memory affect WAL shipping. WAL reader reads it in a single thread, updates in-memory data structures periodically dumping them on disk. Perhaps you want to read one big instruction from WAL and apply it to many buffers using multiple threads? We currently use an un-modified/generic WAL entry, and don't implement our own replay. That means we don'…
Comment linking /blog/block_storage_part_one
on “We made Postgres writes faster, but it broke replication”Submitted Solving Postgres' Search Limitations as a story · 7 points
HN discussionOne of the ParadeDB maintainers here -- Being PostgreSQL wire protocol compatible is very different from being built inside Postgres on top of the Postgres pages, which is what ParadeDB does. You still need the "T" in ETL, e.g. transforming data from your source into the format of the sink (in your example CrateDB). This is where ETL costs and brittleness come into play. You can read more about it here: https://www.…
Comment linking /blog/block_storage_part_one
on “We made Postgres writes faster, but it broke replication”Submitted The Missing Manual for Hybrid Search in PostgreSQL as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> 0 - https://www.paradedb.com/ this looks like repackaging of datafusion as PG extension?..
Comment linking /
on “Using ClickHouse to scale an events engine”Submitted Designing A New Postgres Storage Layout for Search as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> Recently, the most interesting rift in the Postgres vs OLAP space is [Hydra]( https://www.hydra.so ), an open-source, column-oriented distribution of Postgres that was very recently launched (after our migration to ClickHouse). Had Hydra been available during our decision-making time period, we might’ve made a different choice. There will likely be a good OLAP solution (possibly implemented as an extension) in Pos…
Comment linking /
on “Using ClickHouse to scale an events engine”Submitted The making of a search engine: A conversation with the creator of Tantivy as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Recently, the most interesting rift in the Postgres vs OLAP space is [Hydra]( https://www.hydra.so ), an open-source, column-oriented distribution of Postgres that was very recently launched (after our migration to ClickHouse). Had Hydra been available during our decision-making time period, we might’ve made a different choice. There will likely be a good OLAP solution (possibly implemented as an extension) in Pos…
Comment linking /
on “Using ClickHouse to scale an events engine”Submitted Teaching Postgres to Facet Like Elasticsearch as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think what we're seeing with every database company providing new full-text search capabilities is an example of AI coding productivity showing up in the real world. It started with paradeDB and pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing-search Timescale has pg_textsearch https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearch Neon and Databricks have Lakebase Search https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/oltp/projects/la…
Comment linking /blog/introducing-search
on “Tin: full-text search for Postgres”Submitted A Data-Driven Approach to Writing Better Developer Documentation as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm curious how it compares to `pg_search` https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing-search
Comment linking /blog/introducing-search
on “Pg_vectorsearch: An index that is faster than pgvector's IVFFlat and HNSW”Submitted A Conversation with Paul Masurel, Creator of Tantivy as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's been shown in Postgres https://www.paradedb.com/blog/lsm_trees_in_postgres
Comment linking /blog/lsm_trees_in_postgres
on “Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?”Submitted ParadeDB Makes Faceted Search 14× Faster Inside PostgreSQL as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
