Re: Out of the box, full text search feature suggestion for postgresql

Hi Bruce,

As I have mentioned in the initial email, what is currently available in
postgresql in regards to full text search, is tailored for NL experts IMO.
As an average user you will have to dig a lot to configure your DB and your
queries to get some decent speech text results. And you will have to do
these configurations, for every language you will want to support.

I personally spent a couple of weeks trying to set up full text search on a
postgres instance, for a couple of different languages, just to realize
that is very time consuming and hard to maintain it. So in the end I found
proonga, which out of the box, offered me fast full text search support for
any language I wanted, including Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I only
needed to change my select queries to use their full text search operators
(although pgroonnga support out of the box the use of like and ilike
operators) plus I had to create some proonga indexes on the text fields I
wanted to query on. That was it.
They are still missing fuzzy search support and still have to work a bit on
stability (especially on huge DBs), but all these are already on their todo
list.

So in essence, it took me a couple of weeks of tests and a lot of failures
to realize that the postgres existing full text search functionality is too
complicated to setup and use, if you want some decent results. With
pgroonga I got decent full text search results in a matter of hours,
without much changes on my queries.

Thanks,
A

On Thu, Dec 28, 2023 at 11:46 AM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 28, 2023 at 10:15:07AM -0500, aa wrote:
> > Hello Postgres Team!
> >
> > First of all, a big THANK YOU for the great work you folks are doing!
> >
> > The reason I am writing to you is to suggest a feature in future Postgres
> > versions, a feature that is partially there but is not quite where it
> should be
> > in my opinion: the full text search functionality. This functionality in
> my
> > opinion, should be available out of the box, for any possible language
> > available, including east Asia character based languages. You would
> probably
> > say that this will require a huge amount of work, and I would say, a
> postgres
> > extension which does exactly this, already exists, and it is called :
> pgroonga
> > (https://pgroonga.github.io/)
>
> Please explain how this is different from what we already have:
>
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch.html
>
> --
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
> EDB https://enterprisedb.com
>
> Only you can decide what is important to you.
>