Re: Full-text Indexing and Primary Keys

Josh Berkus wrote:

> 1. Can anyone explain to me what "full-text indexing" is, and why we do
> or don't need it for Postgres? The marketing types keep asking me about
> it ("buzzword o' the day") and I don't have an answer for them.

Full text indexing: something like google does for HTML pages, or
fts.postgresql.org does for the PostgresSQL mailing list archives.

Good full text indexing programs understand something about the
language they're indexing and automatically deal with plurals,
suffixes, etc.

Full text indexing is useful for many applications that include text
data along with other more structured information. It is painful to
have to use SQL plus some other facility for searching; just for
starters it usually means keeping a second copy of the data.

I suspect the push for full text indexing in PostgreSQL is stronger
now that the 8KB row size limit that "ancient" releases had is gone.

> 2. I propose that future versions of PostgreSQL require a primary key at
> table creation. Frankly, I'm a little mystified as to why this was not
> done already, but it's not too late to correct ...

SQL uses a "bag" model, not a "set" model. Duplicates are allowed. I
doubt that PostgreSQL wants to step away from both the standards and
current practice in this area.

Regards,

Giles