SQL was designed with tabular data and a relational model in mind, and free-form documents have neither of those properties. You can shoehorn full-text search functionality into SQL - that's what the likes of MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLite do - and it's good enough in cases where search isn't a core competency. But it's awkward to use and subject to the limitations of a syntax catered to declarative queries and rigid schemas.

Google Search used to essentially be this, then they had to tack on finnicky AI systems to handling the parsing of unstructured queries, and that was a cost/time sink that swung the pendulum over to fully AI-native search. This is the pendulum swinging back the other way with a new generation of UX designers. And it'll swing back eventually, too.

A duckdb backend that can query something like Sourcebot would be swell.