eCommerce

Instacart’s recent blog posts and InfoQ coverage paint a picture of a simplified, cost-effective search architecture built entirely on PostgreSQL. It’s a clever consolidation — but also a cautionary tale. For most organizations, especially those with complex catalogs, high query diversity, or real-time ranking needs, this approach is not just suboptimal — it’s misleading. Postgres is a relational database, not a retrieval engine. Treating it like one introduces architectural debt that will eventually come due. While the engineering effort is commendable, the approach is dated and fundamentally flawed for organizations […]