Re: Efficient String searching

On Tue, 25 Sep 2001 Robert(dot)Farrugia(at)go(dot)com(dot)mt wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have the following problem. When doing string searches using the ilike
> command, no indexes are being used. This is giving performance problems,
> whereas it takes longer to sequentially search the whole table. Am i
> missing something about searching for strings ? Are there any efficient
> methods than using regular expressions or like ?

Unless your pattern is anchored at the start, indexes don't get used. In
addition, if you're in a locale other than C, indexes don't get used.
It depends on the kind of string searches you're doing. If you're looking
for words in a longer string, you probably want to look at a full text
indexing solution. IIRC, there's one in contrib and a few others made by
people on the lists.