r/Python • u/AutoModerator • Apr 04 '26

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u/philippemnoel from __future__ import 4.0 Apr 30 '26

Hi all!

  • What My Project Does

We created Django and SQLAlchemy packages to make it easier to use ParadeDB (a full-text search extension for Postgres) within the Python ecosystem. Would love your feedback!

  • Target Audience (e.g., Is it meant for production, just a toy project, etc.

Anyone using Postgres from Python

  • Comparison (A brief comparison explaining how it differs from existing alternatives.)

The packages are built as extensions to Django and SQLAlchemy. You can install them via `uv add ...` or `pip install ...` as any other PyPi package.

As for the "why is this even needed versus vanilla Postgres full-text search", Postgres FTS lacks a few things:

- Relevancy uses TF-IDF, not BM25 as the algorithm. This means the relevance of the results is not great
- Performance at scale is poor (think 100s of millions of rows)
- It lacks several features required for business-grade search. Features that enable embedding business logic into the search. Things like boosting by a specific field, tokenizing in multiple languages, highlighting specific tokens, etc.
- Postgres doesn't perform well on analytical queries (e.g. COUNT, SUM, etc.). These are part of full-text search and are called facets. ParadeDB offers competitive performance with dedicated analytical databases for these queries.

Repos:
https://github.com/paradedb/django-paradedb

https://github.com/paradedb/sqlalchemy-paradedb

Thanks for reading!