Core Concepts
Search Tiers
Understand the LITE, STANDARD, ADVANCED, and VECTOR search tiers in pg-smart-search and how they scale with your data.
Search Tiers
Search performance heavily depends on how your database is indexed. pg-smart-search categorizes search capabilities into four tiers based on dataset size and required indices.
Tier Overview
| Tier | Dataset Size | Engine Features | Indices Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| LITE | < 100k rows | Basic ILIKE | None |
| STANDARD | 100k - 1M rows | Trigrams + FTS | GIN |
| ADVANCED | > 1M rows | Normalized + RUM | RUM + Trigrams |
| VECTOR | Semantic | OpenAI/Gemini | pgvector (HNSW) |
Choosing a Tier
- LITE: Best for admin panels, small internal tools, or early-stage MVPs. Requires zero database migrations.
- STANDARD: The sweet spot for most web applications. Combines typo-tolerance (Trigrams) with fast linguistic matching (FTS).
- ADVANCED: Required for large-scale datasets where standard GIN indices become slow. Uses RUM indices for faster tsvector lookups.
- VECTOR: Used alongside any other tier when semantic understanding (e.g., "meaning of the query") is needed.
You can set up the required indices for your tier automatically using the CLI Migration Suite.