Thanks everyone. Either I'm not that smart or I am working on too many things at once (or both) but making Full Text work seems super tedious. I just have a single VARCHAR field for name, so the full name "William S. Burroughs" is a single row and column. I want to as simply as possible have the ability to search find this record with Will, will, Burr, burroughs, etc.
As far as I can tell, the trigram extension would be the easiest way to implement this. It looks like I wouldn't need to mess with vectors, etc. It would just look like a standard index and query, right? It seems that if I need something more powerful in the future that I could always move to ElasticSearch, Sphinx, or something similar. Does this sound about right? On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Jonathan Vanasco <postg...@2xlp.com> wrote: > > On Nov 18, 2014, at 7:38 AM, Albe Laurenz wrote: > > > That index wouldn't help with the query at all. > > If you really need a full substring search (i.e., you want to find > "howardjohnson"), the only thing that could help are trigram indexes. > > > I stand corrected. > > I ran a sample query on my test database of 100k names > > using a function index `lower(name)` > > this runs an index scan in .2ms > ... where lower(name) = lower('bob'); > > but this runs a sequential scan in 90ms: > ... where lower(name) like lower('%bob%'); > > I didn't know that 'like' doesn't run on indexes! > > using a trigaram index, > > this runs a bitmap index on the trigram, then a bitmap heap on the table. > 13ms. > ...where name ilike '%bob%'; > >