Database Design

Database responsibilities by design

Indexly’s database schema is intentionally simple and stable. Semantic intelligence lives in the indexing layer — not the schema.

Core fields and responsibilities

Field Purpose
content Tier 1 + Tier 2 (searchable)
clean_content Tier 1 only (noise-reduced)
file_metadata Tier 2 + Tier 3 (structured + JSON)

No schema changes were required to introduce semantic filtering.

Why clean_content exists

clean_content stores only human text, aggressively filtered.

This enables future features such as:

  • high-precision search modes
  • relevance tuning
  • hybrid ranking strategies

At the moment, all searches still use content, ensuring backward compatibility.

Metadata handling

Metadata is stored in two forms:

  1. Structured columns (for querying)
  2. Raw JSON (for traceability)

Only semantic metadata (Tier 2) is ever converted into FTS tokens.

file_metadata
├─ structured columns
│  ├─ title
│  ├─ author
│  ├─ camera
│  └─ …
└─ metadata (JSON)

Technical metadata remains queryable without polluting search results.

Safety and scalability

This design provides:

  • zero migration risk
  • predictable performance
  • clean rollback paths
  • future-proof evolution