📣
TiDB Cloud Premium is now in public preview. Unlimited growth, instant elasticity, advanced security for enterprise workloads. Try it out →
​
Sign InStart for Free
AI
Developer
Best Practices
API
​
Sign InStart for Free

PostgreSQL Extensions

PostgreSQL-compatible TiDB Cloud Starter provides a predefined set of PostgreSQL extensions and built-in capabilities for vector search, full-text search, data import, integration, and common PostgreSQL development workflows.

Supported extensions and capabilities

The following extensions and capabilities are currently supported:

Extension or capabilityDescriptionEnablement
vectorProvides the pgvector-compatible VECTOR type, distance operators, similarity search, and HNSW indexing.Built in. CREATE EXTENSION vector can be used to register extension metadata.
embeddingProvides server-side text embedding functions such as embedding() and embed_text().Run CREATE EXTENSION embedding.
Full-Text SearchProvides PostgreSQL-compatible full-text search using tsvector, tsquery, ranking functions, and GIN indexes.Built in.
Chinese tokenization (zhparser-compatible)Provides Chinese-language tokenization for full-text search.Built in and always available.
parquetEnables querying and importing Parquet data from supported URLs.Run CREATE EXTENSION parquet.
httpEnables HTTP requests directly from SQL. HTTP functions are available without registering the extension.Built in.
uuid-osspProvides common UUID generation functions, such as uuid_generate_v4().Built in. CREATE EXTENSION "uuid-ossp" can be used to register extension metadata.

Enable an extension

Some extensions are available automatically, while others must be enabled explicitly with CREATE EXTENSION.

For example:

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS embedding;
CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS parquet;

The vector type and vector operators are built in. You can also run the following statement to register vector in pg_extension for compatibility with tools and ORMs that inspect extension metadata:

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS vector;

To view extensions registered in the current database, run:

SELECT *
FROM pg_extension;

Limitations

The following limitations apply:

  • Only extensions and built-in capabilities explicitly provided by TiDB Cloud are supported.
  • You cannot install arbitrary custom or third-party PostgreSQL extensions.
  • Some supported extensions provide only a subset of the behavior available in upstream PostgreSQL or the corresponding open-source extension.
  • Extension availability and behavior might change during the public preview.
  • pg_cron job scheduling is not supported during public preview. Although CREATE EXTENSION pg_cron might succeed, scheduling functions such as cron.schedule() are not available, and scheduled jobs cannot be executed. Querying cron.job might return an empty result, but this does not indicate that pg_cron is operational.

Was this page helpful?