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Philippe Noël
Co-founder, CEO @ ParadeDB | PostgreSQL for Search & Analytics
Philippe Noël is the Co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, a company that is developing an Elasticsearch alternative built on PostgreSQL.13 Here are some key details about Philippe:
Professional Background
Philippe has a strong entrepreneurial background in the tech industry. Before founding ParadeDB, he co-founded Whist, a browser designed for secure remote work. Whist raised $3 million in funding but was ultimately closed at the end of 2022.1
Current Venture: ParadeDB
ParadeDB is Philippe's current focus. The company aims to revolutionize database technology by offering:
- BM25 full-text search support for PostgreSQL
- Fast analytics capabilities
- A SQL-native alternative to Elasticsearch3
ParadeDB is backed by Y Combinator, demonstrating Philippe's continued success in the startup ecosystem.1
Education and Skills
Philippe's LinkedIn profile highlights his academic achievements:
- Valedictorian
- Recipient of the Governor General of Canada's Academic Medal
- Schulich Leader Scholar
- Desjardins Scholar
- Future Aces Scholar
- IB Scholar2
He is multilingual, with proficiency in:
- French (native or bilingual)
- English (native or bilingual)
- Spanish (professional working proficiency)
- Portuguese (limited working proficiency)2
Approach to Business and Open Source
Philippe emphasizes several key principles in his approach to building ParadeDB:
- Genuineness and transparency in community interactions
- Rapid response to user feedback
- Intellectual honesty about business goals
- Focus on providing value rather than self-promotion
- Passion for the project and technology3
Philippe is actively involved in the PostgreSQL community and frequently speaks at industry events, such as PGConf NYC.4
Highlights
If periodic full database dumps are too slow, an alternative that is sometimes used is dual writes. For example, writing to the database, then updating the search index, then invalidating the cache.
Dual writes have some serious problems, one of which is race conditions. If you have concurrent writes, one value will simply silently overwrite another value.
While re-reading DDIA. ParadeDB is solving this problem for Postgres+Elasticsearch
Interesting read: https://t.co/rQEjZFurWj. Hard to believe people do this


