I'm currently thinking about the multi table search problem and lean towards updating the index table in the ORM (save method of the corresponding Django models in this case). Postgres doesn't seem to support incremental updates of materialized views yet, and always recomputing the whole table just because some few rows changed seems very much overkill to me. That it integrates better into the rest of the app and makes configuring the indexed columns easier is just a bonus.
Not that Postgres probably wouldn't handle the full table refresh effortlessly as it generally does - at least at my scale. But that feels kind of icky to me and I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be a better solution for this yet - everyone building a search function for their site must run into this and I'd expect it to scale terribly at dimensions startups generally aim at.
Not that Postgres probably wouldn't handle the full table refresh effortlessly as it generally does - at least at my scale. But that feels kind of icky to me and I'm surprised there doesn't seem to be a better solution for this yet - everyone building a search function for their site must run into this and I'd expect it to scale terribly at dimensions startups generally aim at.