I moved from ElasticSearch to PG FTS in production, and here are the things I had to give up: 1. PostgreSQL has a cap on column length, and the search index ha

I moved from ElasticSearch to PG FTS in production, and here are the things I had to give up: 1. PostgreSQL has a cap on column length, and the search index has to be stored in a column. The length of the column is indeterminate - it is storing every word in the document and where it's located, so a short document with very many unique words (numbers are treated as words too) can easily burst the cap. This means you have to truncate each document before indexing it, and pray that your cap is set low enough. You can use multiple columns but that slows down search and makes ranking a lot more complicated. I truncate documents at 4MB. 2. PostgreSQL supports custom dictionaries for specific languages, stemmers, and other nice tricks, but none of those are supported by AWS because the dictionary gets stored as a file on the filesystem (it's not a config setting). You can still have custom rules like whether or not numbers count as words.