Schedule - PGConf.DE 2025

From Distance to Intelligence: Evolving Your Vector Search

Date: 2025-05-08
Time: 15:35–16:20
Room: Berlin 1
Level: Intermediate

Search requirements in production environments rarely fit a one-size-fits-all approach. While both full-text and vector search offer distinct advantages, each has inherent limitations. Traditional full-text search struggles with semantic understanding, falling short when users need context-aware results. Vector search emerged as a promising alternative, excelling at semantic relationships but sometimes missing exact matches or struggling to prioritize the most contextually relevant results based on vector distance alone. As we know, PostgreSQL is a relational database that also features full-text and vector search, and therefore, offers many more possibilities beyond these two functionalities. This talk explores how to transform basic vector search implementations into sophisticated search systems, combining the strengths of multiple approaches to deliver more accurate and context-aware results.

Speaker