zombodb

> Your only duty is to abide by the license.

We live in a society. I don’t see any harm in believing we ought to be respectful of the work. That’s all I’m saying. You don’t have to be, but it’s a better world if you are.

> If you want to enforce that everything built on top of a particular open source package also be open source, that belongs in the license.

Yes! I fully agree. The one that creates the thing is the one that gets to choose its license.

Having opened-sourced some bit of work myself, that’s a very difficult decision.

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 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.

I thought I was clear:

> When one develops using open-source software they have an obligation to follow the licenses.

Obviously what follows from one of those licenses is what you say.

I’m glad we agree!

It’s clear that we’re on opposite ends of open-source ideology.

Good luck out there! 2026 is wild times!!

When one develops using open-source software they have an obligation to follow the licenses. They also have a moral obligation to be respectful of the work upon which they’re building. And they have a social obligation to help improve that software where they can.

Those that develop on top of open-source have no obligation to give you their work for free.

You’d be surprised as to the amount of open-source contributions TIN drove towards Postgres, LLVM, and pgrx. And you’d be speechless at the amount of upstream work across all sorts of open-source PlanetScale does. Postgres 18.6, for example, is better for you today, in part, because of TIN. You’re welcome.

Why don’t you like Postgres’ license? It’s as permissive as a license gets.

They also end up with all the infrastructure and processes necessary to keep the external search system in sync, resync/reindex, pkey shipping back to their source of truth in queries, application-side joins and enrichment between both sources. It’s brutal.

Having everything in one place eliminates entire classes of development and especially operational problems.

I’m one of TIN’s developers and if you google my username you’ll see I’ve been in this space for a long time.

The answer to your first question is simply: yes

As far as your second question, what customization do you need that you believe TIN or PlanetScale doesn’t provide? These are things we can do, with alacrity.

Shout out to grapeseed oil

Yup. Just under a 501c3 to help ensure pgrx outlives us.

Huge thanks to TCDI (www.tcdi.com) for continuing to fund development.

Y'all have built something cool. I'm excited to see where it goes from here.

If there's anything the pgrx team can do to help, just let us know.

If you build it, they'll come. The only limit is yourself!

Nice deck, Ryan! And thanks for the mentions. ;)