PostgreSQL 9.0.23 Documentation | ||||
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The examples in the previous section illustrated full text matching using simple constant strings. This section shows how to search table data, optionally using indexes.
It is possible to do a full text search without an index. A simple query to print the title of each row that contains the word friend in its body field is:
SELECT title FROM pgweb WHERE to_tsvector('english', body) @@ to_tsquery('english', 'friend');
This will also find related words such as friends and friendly, since all these are reduced to the same normalized lexeme.
The query above specifies that the english configuration is to be used to parse and normalize the strings. Alternatively we could omit the configuration parameters:
SELECT title FROM pgweb WHERE to_tsvector(body) @@ to_tsquery('friend');
This query will use the configuration set by default_text_search_config.
A more complex example is to select the ten most recent documents that contain create and table in the title or body:
SELECT title FROM pgweb WHERE to_tsvector(title || ' ' || body) @@ to_tsquery('create & table') ORDER BY last_mod_date DESC LIMIT 10;
For clarity we omitted the coalesce
function calls which would be needed
to find rows that contain NULL in one
of the two fields.
Although these queries will work without an index, most applications will find this approach too slow, except perhaps for occasional ad-hoc searches. Practical use of text searching usually requires creating an index.
We can create a GIN index (Section 12.9) to speed up text searches:
CREATE INDEX pgweb_idx ON pgweb USING gin(to_tsvector('english', body));
Notice that the 2-argument version of to_tsvector
is used. Only text search
functions that specify a configuration name can be used in
expression indexes (Section
11.7). This is because the index contents must be
unaffected by default_text_search_config.
If they were affected, the index contents might be inconsistent
because different entries could contain tsvectors that were created with different text
search configurations, and there would be no way to guess which
was which. It would be impossible to dump and restore such an
index correctly.
Because the two-argument version of to_tsvector
was used in the index above, only
a query reference that uses the 2-argument version of
to_tsvector
with the same
configuration name will use that index. That is, WHERE to_tsvector('english', body) @@ 'a &
b' can use the index, but WHERE
to_tsvector(body) @@ 'a & b' cannot. This ensures that
an index will be used only with the same configuration used to
create the index entries.
It is possible to set up more complex expression indexes wherein the configuration name is specified by another column, e.g.:
CREATE INDEX pgweb_idx ON pgweb USING gin(to_tsvector(config_name, body));
where config_name is a column in the pgweb table. This allows mixed configurations in the same index while recording which configuration was used for each index entry. This would be useful, for example, if the document collection contained documents in different languages. Again, queries that are meant to use the index must be phrased to match, e.g., WHERE to_tsvector(config_name, body) @@ 'a & b'.
Indexes can even concatenate columns:
CREATE INDEX pgweb_idx ON pgweb USING gin(to_tsvector('english', title || ' ' || body));
Another approach is to create a separate tsvector column to hold the output of to_tsvector
. This example is a concatenation
of title and body, using coalesce
to ensure that one field will still
be indexed when the other is NULL:
ALTER TABLE pgweb ADD COLUMN textsearchable_index_col tsvector; UPDATE pgweb SET textsearchable_index_col = to_tsvector('english', coalesce(title,'') || ' ' || coalesce(body,''));
Then we create a GIN index to speed up the search:
CREATE INDEX textsearch_idx ON pgweb USING gin(textsearchable_index_col);
Now we are ready to perform a fast full text search:
SELECT title FROM pgweb WHERE textsearchable_index_col @@ to_tsquery('create & table') ORDER BY last_mod_date DESC LIMIT 10;
When using a separate column to store the tsvector representation, it is necessary to create a trigger to keep the tsvector column current anytime title or body changes. Section 12.4.3 explains how to do that.
One advantage of the separate-column approach over an
expression index is that it is not necessary to explicitly
specify the text search configuration in queries in order to
make use of the index. As shown in the example above, the query
can depend on default_text_search_config. Another advantage is
that searches will be faster, since it will not be necessary to
redo the to_tsvector
calls to
verify index matches. (This is more important when using a GiST
index than a GIN index; see Section 12.9.) The
expression-index approach is simpler to set up, however, and it
requires less disk space since the tsvector representation is not stored
explicitly.