I’m building an app that stores long, unstructured notes like:

“February 6th, 2026 – This is a note about Bob Maynard. He likes the color green…”

These notes can be fairly long and I need to:

• Store them durably

• Search them by keywords later

• Also connect them to other entities (people, accounts, etc.) via a graph model

My backend stack is:

• PostgreSQL

• Apache AGE (for graph relationships)

Right now I’m trying to decide where the note text itself should live.

The two options I’m considering:

1. Store the note body directly on Apache AGE nodes

   • Each (:Note) node would contain the full text

   • Relationships like (:Person)-[:HAS_NOTE]->(:Note)

   • But I’m unsure how well AGE handles large text and text search

2. Store the note body in a PostgreSQL table (TEXT column)

   • Use AGE nodes to store only the note ID and relationships

   • Fetch/search note text via PostgreSQL (possibly full-text search)

   • Join graph traversal results back to the table

My questions:

• Is Apache AGE appropriate for storing and searching long free-text notes?

• Or is it better practice to keep the text in PostgreSQL and use AGE only for relationships?

• Are there known performance or design pitfalls with either approach?

I don’t currently need fuzzy search or autocomplete (so Elasticsearch feels like overkill), but I do need good keyword search and graph traversal.

What’s the recommended architecture here?