Definition
Full-text search (FTS) indexes and queries unstructured text in databases or dedicated search engines — supporting keyword, phrase, Boolean, fuzzy, and relevance-ranked retrieval.
Key Points
- 2026-09-16: planetscale tin GA — Postgres-native FTS with TINQL, MVCC-correct updates, eliminating Elasticsearch sidecar sync for PlanetScale customers (2026-09-19-planetscale-tin-postgres-full-text-search)
- Postgres built-in options: GIN/GiST
tsvectorindexes — widely used but lack BM25 and advanced span queries at scale - Alternative: external OpenSearch/Elasticsearch pipelines — operational overhead from sync lag and dual storage
Vendor benchmark claims (541× vs GIN) are PlanetScale-reported on 150M-doc corpus — independent replication unlikely short-term.