Can You Run Hybrid Search on One Database? Yes! Here's How CrateDB Does It

Search has got more powerful, but also more complicated It used to be that database queries were simple enough. Either you had an index, or you didn't, and either way you had some kind of optimizer (cost or rule) that turned your SQL statement into a viable plan for finding and returning your data. We now live in a world where in addition to the Boolean logic of traditional RDBMS queries, we also have: Geospatial queries Full text search queries, using BM25 . Vector Search And if that weren't enough, we have to consider that instead of a traditional application issuing the query, it might be an MCP server, and most importantly of all, the business need might be for two or more of these searches to happen at the same time, on the same data. For example: "An MCP server that uses a single, combined geospatial + full text query to identify towns in Bavaria with castles mentioned in text descriptions." How does CrateDB help with this? CrateDB is one of the limited number of products that not only supports all of these search types but is also capable of storing arbitrarily large quantities of data. This is important, as if you have to hit multiple different database servers to solve your business question, not only is your environment much more complicated, but you risk getting incorrect answers as your multiple databases may be out of sync. In this two-part example, based on our playable IOT Analytics scenario, we will show two things: Using Geo + Text to search a weather/tourism database Using CrateDB as a '360 view' for your MCP server If you want to follow along with this post, the setup is based on our IoT Analytics scenario. You can also just skip this blog post and jump straight to the scenario. Using Geo + Full text to search a weather/tourism database The table we're going to use is called ' German Regions ': CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS demo . german_regions ( region_name TEXT PRIMARY KEY , geo_coords GEO_SHAPE , tourism_info TEXT INDEX USING FULLTEXT WITH ( anal