405: Elasticsearch → Postgres Search
By Blogger
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Tue, 19 Aug 2025 19:15:02 +0000
Alex & Chris get into a fairly recent technological change at CodePen where we ditched our Elasticsearch implementation for just using our own Postgres database for search. Sometimes choices like this are more about team expertise, dev environment practicalities, and complexity tradeoffs. We found this change to be much better for us, which matters! For the most part search is better and faster. Postgres is not nearly as fancy and capable as Elasticsearch, but we werent taking advantage of what Elasticsearch had to offer anyway.
For the power users out there: it’s true that we’ve lost the ability to do in-code search for now. But it’s temporary and will be coming back in time.
Time Jumps
- 00:07 Alex is back!
- 01:10 The history of search at CodePen
- 02:15 Why was Elasticsearch not the right choice for CodePen?
- 09:36 Why we’re using PostGres instead
- 15:18 What does triggers have to do with search?
- 21:02 Figuring out what people are actually searching for
- 24:19 Some of the tradeoffs in changing search
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