Comment by marginalia_nu
9 hours ago
If you held a gun to my head and forced me to make a guess I'd say you could push that approach to order of 100K, maybe 1M documents.
If sqlite had a generic "strictly ascending sequence of integers" type[1] and would optimize around that, you could probably push it farther in terms of implementing efficient inverted indexes.
[1] primary key tables aren't really useful here.
From my experience, SQLite's FTS5 is orders of magnitude more performant than that, i.e. for 100K documents, 7 queries/second on some of the cheapest 1 vCPU Virtual Machines.
But it is true that a specialized search engine using a more clever algorithm might be another order of magnitude faster.