[brunohaid]

Bit thin on details and not looking like they’ll open source it, but if someone clicked the post because they’re looking for their “replace ES” thing:

Both https://typesense.org/ and https://duckdb.org/ (with their spatial plugin) are excellent geo performance wise, the latter now seems really production ready, especially when the data doesn’t change that often. Both fully open source including clustered/sharded setups.

No affiliation at all, just really happy camper.

[j_kao]

These are great projects, we use DuckDB to inspect our data lake and for quick munging.

We will have some more blog posts in the future describing different parts of the system in more detail. We were worried too much density in a single post would make it hard to read.

[sureglymop]

These are great. I am eternally grateful that projects like this are open source, I do however find it hard to integrate them into your own projects.

A while ago I tried to create something that has duckdb + its spatial and SQLite extensions statically linked and compiled in. I realized I was a bit in over my head when my build failed because both of them required SQLite symbols but from different versions.

[atombender]

DuckDB does not have any kind of sharding or clustering? It doesn't even have a server (unless you count the HTTP Server Extension)?

[brunohaid]

Good point and was mostly re Typesense (can't edit the comment anymore).

But given that duckdb handles "take this n GB parquet file/shard from a random location, load it into memory and be ready in < 1 sec" very well I'd argue it's quite easy to build something that scales horizontally.

We use it for both the importer pipeline that processes the 2B row / 200GB compressed GBIF.org parquet dataset and queries like https://www.meso.cloud/plants/pinophyta/cupressales/pinopsid... and the sheer amount of functions[1] beyond simple stuff like "how close is a/b to x/y" or is "n within area x" is just a joy to work with.

[1] https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/core_extensions/spatial/funct...

[steve_adams_86]

Duckdb is so absurdly portable you can solve all kinds of performance and scaling concerns this way. It's really a wonderful, fun piece of software.

[maxboone]

Motherduck is the spin-off from DuckDBthat does that. But there's also: https://duckdb.org/2025/05/27/ducklake.html

You can also attach DuckDB to Apache Flight which will make it work beyond local operation.

[jjordan]

Typesense is an absolute beast, and it has a pretty great dev experience to boot.

[porridgeraisin]

Can you share what makes it better than competitors? And what's great about the dev experience? Did you use their cloud offering? The marketing material looks great, but I want to hear a user's experience.

[brunohaid]

For me it's a combination 1) solid foundational choices all along, no bolted on vanity features or constant rewrites chasing the latest trend, with everything well documented and 2) incredibly responsive founding team, so you get very quick answers from the people actually building it.

[mcdonje]

Not sure what they'll opensource. The rust code? They're calling it a DB, but they described an entire stack.

[ericcholis]

Typsense as a product has been great (hosted cluster). Customer support has been awesome as well.