Building a Native Search Engine in PostgreSQL: ParadeDB's Journey to Replace Elasticsearch with Philippe Noël

Tech on the Rocks

In this episode, we chat with Philippe Noël, founder of ParadeDB, about building an Elasticsearch alternative natively on PostgreSQL.

We explore the challenges and benefits of extending PostgreSQL versus building a separate system, diving into topics like full-text search, faceted analytics, and why organizations need these capabilities.

We discuss the emerging bring-your-own-cloud deployment model, the state of the PostgreSQL extension ecosystem, and what makes a truly production-ready database extension.

Philippe shares insights on the future of search technology and how recent AI developments are actually increasing the demand for traditional search capabilities.

The conversation also covers the misconceptions around PostgreSQL's scalability and the trade-offs between multi-tenant and single-tenant architectures in modern data infrastructure.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to ParadeDB and Its Mission
06:35 User-Facing Search and Analytics
11:45 The Role of Postgres in Modern Data Solutions
17:30 Future of Multimodal Databases
31:04 The Rise of Fintech and Data Integrity
36:36 Deployment Models: BYOC and Control Plane
43:41 The Evolution of Cloud Infrastructure and Serverless Databases
49:38 The Future of Search and Community Engagement

Click here to view the episode transcript.