This is a valid comment that I'd expand to say "...without exhausting all the tools available." For example, if you're facing lengthy search queries and are lo

This is a valid comment that I'd expand to say "...without exhausting all the tools available." For example, if you're facing lengthy search queries and are looking at partitioning the database to speed them up, many databases include helpful internal tools that should be attempted first. Proper indexing is a textbook all on it's own, and the appropriate design of full-text search dictionaries and queries is another. The one that shocked me a year or two ago was implementing full-text search in a gigantic sqlite DB. I was preparing to migrate it to postgresql or elasticsearch because my traditional "ilike" queries, even indexed, were ridiculously slow, and I was not aware FTS was an included library. Although FTS pretty much doubled the size of the DB, a three minute query dropped to a few seconds. Since read queries are non-blocking in sqlite, this allowed me to continue using the DB without needing a bigger, more complex solution.