Lucene really does feel like magic sometimes. It was designed expressly to solve the top K problem at hyper scale. It's incredibly mature technology. You can go from zero to a billion documents without thinking too
much about anything other than the amount of mass storage you have available.
Every time I've used Lucene I have combined it with a SQL provider. It's not necessarily about one or the other. The FTS facilities within the various SQL providers are convenient, but not as capable by comparison. I don't think mixing these into the same thing makes sense. They are two very different animals that are better joined by way of the document ids.
Under the hood, ParadeDB is built by integrating Tantivy (a Lucene-inspired Rust search library) inside Postgres. This is to say: I agree with you -- We're not trying to claim that Postgres itself is an alternative to Lucene, but rather that something like Lucene can be integrated inside Postgres so that you can get the power of both in a single system (or in a cluster of Postgres instances)
- saves infra costs
- saves infra headaches
- devs only need to be experts in one system (or well I guess one and a half, probably there's something to learn about ParadeDB too, but probably less than in learning Lucine)
- no need to worry about keeping data up to date in the separate seach system
- all data is available when you want to do new queries that you handn't thought of when implementing the data transfer/indexing
Every time I've used Lucene I have combined it with a SQL provider. It's not necessarily about one or the other. The FTS facilities within the various SQL providers are convenient, but not as capable by comparison. I don't think mixing these into the same thing makes sense. They are two very different animals that are better joined by way of the document ids.