In the later part of the slides, I learned that Postgres 12 now supports case and accent insensitive collations. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/collation.html#COLLA...

For the many simple cases where a grep-like search is enough, my little experience with pg was far from satisfying. MySQL is simple to use for this thanks to the awfully named `utf8_mb4_unicode_ci`. With Postgres, searching for "étranger" won't find "Etranger" and "Étranger" unless you put some hard work into your database search system.

Unfortunately, it seems that PG12 won't change much in that aspect. From the link above, you have to create the collation (which is already a heavy restriction) and then "certain operations are not possible with nondeterministic collations, such as pattern matching operations." Looks like uncharted territory.

On a side note, I've always seen Solr, SphinxSearch and such specialized tools used instead of the DB's FTS. The main drawback is keeping the data in sync, but it has many pros.