Re: Differences between to_tsquery() and plainto_tsquery() when it comes to applying an index?

> Not per se, but maybe looking at the actual outputs of the two function
> calls would be enlightening.  I suspect you'll find that the search
> conditions you are getting are not equivalent.

Strictly speaking they're not, b/c the plainto_tsquery() is chaining
several tokens together.

However, at the heart of the question is this: if I define the index on
that column like this:

CREATE INDEX item_eng_searchable_text_idx ON item USING
gin(to_tsvector('english', searchable_text));

since, unlike the example in the
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/textsearch-tables.html
doc, I cannot define the searchable
text column in the table as being being of type ts_vector(), because the
text is not exclusively in English;

then, will the index be effective?

Based on some empirical experiments, it seems not.

If that's indeed that case, then how should I create the index?

> In that case you haven't understood how text search works at all.
> It simply doesn't do that.  You could possibly follow up a text search
> for component words with a LIKE or similar comparison to verify that
> the matches actually contain the desired string.

I cannot use LIKE on each token of the phrase because the text in the
column is unordered, and I would have to do an ILIKE '%'+token+'%' on
each to be logically correct.

IIRC, wildcards of the form token+'%' can use an index efficiently, but
wildcards on both ends such as '%'+token+'%' do not.

I did think about splitting the phrase tokens and doing a tsquery() join
on each token, but it seemed that's why plainto_tsquery() was created,
unless I misunderstood the docs on that specific point.