Thread: Text search

Text search

From
Jan Ploski
Date:
Hi,

Thanks for all your remarks regarding 7.1's stability. I'm going to get
it running as our mail/news database backend and come back with bug
reports ;-)

Another question which comes to my mind: what would be the best way to
implement a search feature for such a database? I know that there are
specialized tools such as glimpse for fast and fancy indexing of text
content. Can anyone recommend a solution for PostgreSQL-databased messages
or, as a matter of fact, for performing text search in big relational
databases generally? I am curious how sites such as the former Deja.com
approach this problem. Do they just rely on simple SELECTs with regular
expressions in the WHERE clause or do they export messages into some
external format and feed them to specialized indexing software for
pre-processing?

-JPL

Re: Text search

From
"Richard Huxton"
Date:
From: "Jan Ploski" <jpljpl@gmx.de>


> Hi,
>
> Thanks for all your remarks regarding 7.1's stability. I'm going to get
> it running as our mail/news database backend and come back with bug
> reports ;-)
>
> Another question which comes to my mind: what would be the best way to
> implement a search feature for such a database? I know that there are
> specialized tools such as glimpse for fast and fancy indexing of text
> content. Can anyone recommend a solution for PostgreSQL-databased messages
> or, as a matter of fact, for performing text search in big relational
> databases generally? I am curious how sites such as the former Deja.com
> approach this problem. Do they just rely on simple SELECTs with regular
> expressions in the WHERE clause or do they export messages into some
> external format and feed them to specialized indexing software for
> pre-processing?

There is the full-text-indexing in contrib/

Udmsearch has Postgres interfaces although I haven't really used it yet. It
does web/text and database searches.

I think it powers the postgresql.org website search, which might or might
not be a ringing endorsement.

- Richard Huxton