Several years ago I was responsible for a CMS for a local newspapers website. A contractor making updates used ElasticSearch to search for articles. It was a

Several years ago I was responsible for a CMS for a local newspapers website. A contractor making updates used ElasticSearch to search for articles. It was a rather botched setup with ES crashing once in a while and the search index sliding out of sync with the database. I was using Django and rewrote the search just simply collecting a dictionary of terms that I would then explode into filter on the model. A database of order 100k articles with something like 50 fields, about 20 of them foreign keys, bulk text fields of several to tens of KB responded within milliseconds on a 4 core 4GB machine under load. The "weird thing" about it that I didn't understand at the time was that using a more complex query would often result in speedups. I understand it better now after this article since PG builds some sort of index on text fields. PG is one of the infrastructure pieces that you install and then it just runs performantly without much fuss. There probably are cases where it fails horribly but in almost a decade of use I have yet to see a single operations failure.