Re: Full-text Indexing and Primary Keys

Josh,

Full Text Indexing

It will allow you to store text into a database and find portions of this
text again, based on a few words of the text in the record.
Say, for example, you want to store the bible in a PostGres database. You
will store these fields:
1. Book
2. Chapter
3. Verse
4. Verse text

If you know your bible, you probably can find any passage by just going to
book/chapter/verse directly. But if you're not, and you just want to find
all verses, where "Nathan", "Solomon" and "mother" is mentioned, you need
something which lets you do that - and fast.

What you want is something which does:
select verse_text from bible where verse_text contains 'Nathan & Solomon &
mother';

or even:
select verse_text from bible where verse_text contains 'Nath* & Solo* &
moth*';

This would be similar to "find file on hard drive by content" - which, if
not indexed, takes forever.

Hope this makes the issue a little more clear.

Best regards,
Chris



----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh Berkus" <josh@agliodbs.com>
To: <pgsql-sql@postgresql.org>
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 10:32 AM
Subject: [SQL] Full-text Indexing and Primary Keys


> Folks,
>
> 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.
>
> 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 ...
>
> -Josh
>
>
>
> ______AGLIO DATABASE SOLUTIONS___________________________
>                                        Josh Berkus
>   Complete information technology      josh@agliodbs.com
>    and data management solutions       (415) 565-7293
>   for law firms, small businesses        fax 621-2533
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