Thinking Elixir Podcast 290: Postgres Finally Gets Real Search

News includes Elixir v1.20.0-rc.1 with important type system improvements, not one but two new Elixir-native Bash interpreters for seamless interop, LiveCapture bringing zero-boilerplate storybooks to LiveView components, Christian Alexander's DurableObject library for persistent actors inspired by Cloudflare, Postgres getting a game-changing BM25 text search extension that rivals Elasticsearch, a breakthrough RAG approach that eliminates vector databases entirely while achieving 98.7% accuracy, and more! *Elixir Community News* - Paraxial.io is sponsoring today's show! Sign up for a free trial of Paraxial.io today and mention Thinking Elixir when you schedule a demo for a special offer. – https://paraxial.io/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_campaign=thinkingelixir-oct2025 - Elixir v1.20.0-rc.1 released with bug fixes including improved type system performance and bitstring type handling – https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.20.0-rc.1 - Discussion of Credo warning issue with missing @moduledoc when using Elixir 1.20 RCs - fix is to upgrade Credo – https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-v1-20-0-rc-0-and-rc-1-released-type-inference-of-all-constructs/73927/31 - New Elixir-native Bash interpreter with complete implementation of Bash built-ins and quirks – http://github.com/tv-labs/bash - Second Elixir-native Bash interpreter implementation – https://github.com/elixir-ai-tools/just_bash - LiveCapture - zero-boilerplate storybook for LiveView components requiring only single line capture_all() – https://github.com/achempion/live_capture - ElixirForum post with more details about LiveCapture by Boris Kuznetsov – https://elixirforum.com/t/livecapture-zero-boilerplate-storybook-for-liveview-components-by-waffle-creator/74028 - Example LiveCapture storybook showing all components from LiveDashboard – https://captures.captureui.com/phoenix_live_dashboard/components/Elixir.Phoenix.LiveDashboard.HomePage/render - Autumn has been renamed to Lumis - v0.1.0 has same API as autumn v0.6.0 – https://github.com/leandrocp/autumn/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md - MDEx project that uses Lumis for syntax highlighting – https://github.com/leandrocp/mdex - SoftwareMansion announcement of updated Elixir Language Tour – https://x.com/swmansionElixir/status/2014378959962567078 - Updated Elixir Language Tour using Popcorn to run Elixir in browser via AtomVM – https://elixir-language-tour.swmansion.com/introduction - Popcorn project that executes Elixir code in WebAssembly using AtomVM – https://github.com/software-mansion/popcorn - DurableObject library for Elixir - persistent, single-instance objects accessed by ID – https://github.com/ChristianAlexander/durable_object - DurableObject documentation explaining stateful, persistent actors using GenServer, Ecto, and Spark DSL – https://hexdocs.pm/durable_object/readme.html - Cloudflare documentation describing Durable Objects and the Actor programming model – https://developers.cloudflare.com/durable-objects/concepts/what-are-durable-objects/ - Announcement about Postgres getting advanced text searching extension with BM25 ranking – https://x.com/akshay_pachaar/status/2014314783391298019 - pg_textsearch extension bringing BM25 relevance ranking to Postgres (v0.5.0-dev, GA expected Feb 2026) – https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearch - Torus library for making search easier in Postgres for Elixir projects – https://hexdocs.pm/torus - New RAG approach that doesn't need vector DB, embedding, chunking, or similarity search - hits 98.7% accuracy – https://x.com/_avichawla/status/2014586815714664698 - Explanation of SOTA (State of the Art) in AI models – https://huggingface.co/blog/daya-shankar/sota-ai-models - PageIndex - vectorless, reasoning-based RAG system using hierarchical tree index for long professional documents – https://github.com/VectifyAI/PageIndex Podcast Episode - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/290 *Find us online* - Message on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/thinkingelixir.com - Message on Twitter/X - https://x.com/ThinkingElixir - Email the show - [email protected] - Mark Ericksen on Twitter/X - https://x.com/brainlid - Mark Ericksen on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/brainlid.bsky.social - David Bernheisel on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/david.bernheisel.com *Like, Subscribe, and Share!* 👍 Subscribe to stay updated with our latest episodes. Hit the bell icon to get notified. If you found this helpful, please give it a thumbs up and share it with your friends!