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Databases Intermediate

What is Full-Text Search?

A technique for searching natural language text in databases using word stemming, ranking, and relevance scoring.

Full-text search goes beyond simple LIKE queries. It tokenizes text into words, applies stemming (running → run), removes stop words (the, is, at), and ranks results by relevance. PostgreSQL provides built-in tsvector/tsquery types.

Features include phrase search, proximity search, weighted columns, and fuzzy matching. PostgreSQL's GIN indexes accelerate full-text queries. For more advanced needs, dedicated search engines like Elasticsearch or Meilisearch offer additional features.

Related Terms

Database Index Types
Different index structures (B-tree, Hash, GIN, GiST, BRIN) optimized for various query patterns and data types.
Foreign Key
A column that creates a link between two tables by referencing the primary key of another table.
SQL
Structured Query Language — the standard language for managing and querying data in relational databases.
Window Function
An SQL function that performs calculations across a set of rows related to the current row without collapsing the result set.
Schema
The structure definition of a database including tables, columns, data types, relationships, indexes, and constraints.
Materialized View
A database object that stores the precomputed result of a query, offering faster reads at the cost of periodic refresh.
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