Re: querying both text and non-text properties

Rob Nikander wrote:
> I’ve got an application where I’d like to search a collection of objects
> based on various properties, some text and others non-text (bools, enums,
> ints, etc). I’ve used full text search before, following the PG docs to
> set up a index on a ts_vector. And of course I’ve used normal indexes
> before for accelerating basic queries that use non-text columns.
>
> Any recommendations on combining the two? For example, if I search for
> objects where the description text matches [some ts_query] and the
> color = red, I can imagine putting the color property into the text
> index somehow - maybe with tokens like: ’color_red’, ‘color_blue’,
> but for something like an integer … ?

You have two options:

A combined index:

CREATE EXTENSION btree_gin;
CREATE INDEX ON fulltext USING gin (to_tsvector('english', doc), color);

That is the perfect match for a query with

WHERE color = 'red' AND to_tsvector('german', doc) @@ to_tsquery('english', 'word');

But you can also create two indexes:

CREATE INDEX ON fulltext USING gin (to_tsvector('english', doc));
CREATE INDEX ON fulltext (color);

Then you don't need the extension, and PostgreSQL can still use them for the search,
either only one of them if the condition is selective enough, or a "BitmapAnd" of both.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe
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