Re: Very slow search using basic pattern matching - Mailing list pgsql-sql

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 16:47:11 +0100, Dan Field <dof@llgc.org.uk> wrote:
> FROM
>     da_records
> WHERE
>     da_records.DESCRIPTION_CY ~* '.*Aberystwyth*.'
>  OR
>     da_records.TITLE_CY ~* '.*Aberystwyth*.'
> limit 100
> 
> Is there a better way of matching the string? (Must be case insensitive)

This is going to require a sequential scan and if you aren't going to
hit 100 entries near the beginning of the table, you will be effectively
doing a full scan of the table.

You might try looking at the tsearch2 contrib entry (a package for full text
searching) as that will likely be able to help you out.