← All IntelClip / EducationWhy traditional search databases failed at scale
From Fireside Chat: Simon Eskildsen on Building Turbopuffer · ≈21:06
“It was just very difficult to get it to do what I did”
“There's no query planner and like I couldn't figure out why it wasn't there”
“It was very difficult to operate”
What’s in it
- Hears a Shopify engineer's frustration with a legacy search database
- Explains why missing query planners make performance unpredictable
- Sets up the backstory for why they built their own search tool
Clip transcript
again? >> I think it was there's three things that sort of came to a head. Um the last project that I worked on at Shopify was search and I didn't have a good time. >> What what what did you use back there? Um I don't we don't need to name names of other database companies but it was uh it was one of the one of the like traditional search companies that a lot of different um companies run and it was just very difficult to get it to do what I did and I was just like the projects that touched that database just I couldn't get them to perform at the napkin math and like there's there's no query planner and like I couldn't figure out why it wasn't there and sometimes it tracked and then sometimes it really didn't track at all and so I tried to learn as much as I could to figure out and like start reading the source code of it and I was just I couldn't get it to track very often. It was very difficult to operate and so I just that was sort of like in the back of my head. I never thought I would touch that
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