ZOzombodb·Sep 19, 2026
Over Postgres' FTS, TIN provides at least:
- superior performance
- superior operational overhead
- no second copy of data in tsvector form
- BM25 scoring support with optimized top-k output
- runtime configurable scoring knobs
- expression-attached score boosting
- sophisticated span query support -- this is proximity search on steroids (https://github.com/planetscale/lead/tree/main/tinql/docs)
- lossless term positions
- index-answerable negative expressions (find all docs that don't contain a word)
- full document hit highlighting
- optimized exact `count(\*)`
- term expansion via any of fuzzy matching, wildcards, regular expressions, and dictionary ranges
- intentionally smaller user-facing SQL API surface
There's a lot we didn't cover in the announcement blog. I'm sure we'll do more as time goes on.
As an
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aside, something I personally think is cool, and I suppose you can do this with Postgres' built-in `@@` too, is that you can use TIN's full query language (linked above) against any text datum. This is a valid query:
SELECT pid, query
FROM pg_stat_activity
WHERE query ==> 'select OR copy'
in other words, you don't need an index at all to use TIN's full query language against any text field in any query.