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# Optimizing Discovery: PostgreSQL's Role in Transforming GetYourGuide's Search


- **Date:** Thursday, Jul 10, 2025
- **Time:** 11:30–12:00 (30 min)
- **Room:** Stage 8
- **Event:** World Congress 2025
- **Tags:** data engineering, databases, java, open source, performance, scalability, spring

## Recording

[Watch recording](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1647-optimizing-discovery-postgresql-s-role-in-transforming-getyourguide-s-search)

## Description

Search is broken into 2 components at GetYourGuide. Structured and Unstructured Search. While opensearch and json gave us a lot of flexibility in schema and access to the data with simple filtering over complex json data types and aggregations, there were ofcourse tradeoffs, like performance, and complexity to manage Opensearch cluster. As well as lack of simple scalability and significant slow writes to avoid read impact. A lot more troubles that I would like to present, but more on the pros of Postgres, and how it helped us achieved a nice hybrid schema with tables that have hybrid denormalization allowing us to build a strong foundation that opened up a lot of possibilities for our Marketplace. 
Impact - PG is 40% faster in those queries when we compared against Opensearch.

## Speaker

### [Dharin Shah](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@dharin-shah)

Staff Software Engineer at GetYourGuide


## Related talks at this congress

- [Harnessing the Power of Open Source's Newest Technologies](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/868-harnessing-the-power) — Francisco Carneiro
- [Planet-Scale Dashboards](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/699-planet-scale) — Robert Lehmann
- [How to Decipher User Uncertainty with GenAI and Vector Search](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/864-how-to-decipher-user) — Ben Greenberg
- [Fault Tolerance and Consistency at Scale: Harnessing the Power of Distributed SQL Databases](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2025/sessions/859-fault-tolerance-and) — Wei Hu