Building Fast Video Search with SQLite FTS5

Full-text search is essential for any content platform. While Elasticsearch and Meilisearch are popular choices, SQLite's built-in FTS5 extension provides surprisingly capable search for small to medium datasets. Here's how I implemented it for DailyWatch . Creating the FTS5 Table FTS5 uses "virtual tables" that maintain a separate search index: -- Content table (your regular table) CREATE TABLE videos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT , video_id TEXT UNIQUE NOT NULL , title TEXT NOT NULL , description TEXT , channel_title TEXT , category_id INTEGER , thumbnail_url TEXT , view_count INTEGER DEFAULT 0 , published_at TEXT , fetched_at TEXT DEFAULT ( datetime ( 'now' )) ); -- FTS5 virtual table linked to content table CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE videos_fts USING fts5 ( title , description , channel_title , content = 'videos' , content_rowid = 'id' , tokenize = 'porter unicode61 remove_diacritics 2' ); Key options: content='videos' links to the main table content_rowid='id' maps FTS rows to