Re: Levenshtein Distance with more than 255 characters

Szymon Guz <mabewlun@gmail.com> writes:
> On 6 September 2013 01:00, Janek Sendrowski <janek12@web.de> wrote:
>> I'm searching for an optimized Levenshtein Distance like Postgresql's. My
>> problem is that I want to compare strings with a length over 255 characters.
>> Does anyone know a solution?

> I'm not sure there is anything different from what you've found in
> core/contribs. But you can always use pg/plpython or pg/plperl procedure
> with some external library calculating the distance.

Well, you could just rebuild the fuzzystrmatch module with a different
value for MAX_LEVENSHTEIN_STRLEN.  The comments in the code note that the
comparison cost is roughly O(N^2) in the string length, and the reason for
having a limit at all is to ensure the function runtime doesn't get out of
hand --- but it seems likely to me that 255 is an unnecessarily
conservative limit.  If you wanted to do a few tests and report back on
just how slow it can get, we might be persuaded to raise the stock
setting.

            regards, tom lane