From PostgreSQL to Elasticsearch: Migrating a Fuzzy Name Search at Scale

📅 Date: Thursday, October 15 from 6:00-9:00 PM 📍 Location: Elastic London Office Davidson Building, 1st Floor, 5 Southampton St, London, WC2E 7HA 👉 Important: Please use the Exeter St entrance as the main entrance is closed after 6 PM. ⚠️ Entrance will be on a first come, first served basis, subject to room capacity — arrive on time to guarantee your spot. ⏰ Agenda Arrivals, pizza and drinks: 6 PM Welcome: 6:30 PM Talk #1: 6:45 - 7:15 PM Talk #2: 7:15 PM - 7:45 PM Networking: 7:45 PM Closing: 8:30 PM

Talk \#1 by Amir Hossein Rassafi \| Software Engineer at Condukt What happens when your search quality is good but your database can't keep up? In this talk, we'll walk through a real migration from PostgreSQL's pg_trgm to Elasticsearch — driven by growing latency and database pressure. We'll cover how to preserve trigram-like behaviour using n-grams, prefixes, keywords, and shingles, how to validate the new system with real queries and synthetic typo cases, and the production details that made the migration safe: replication, checkpointing, lag handling, and replayable indexing. A practical talk for anyone dealing with fuzzy search at scale — or planning a migration where quality, performance, and reliability all matter.

*Talk #2 details TBC soon*