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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

Vacuum
A PostgreSQL maintenance operation that reclaims storage from dead tuples and updates statistics for the query planner.
SQL
Structured Query Language — the standard language for managing and querying data in relational databases.
Replication
The process of copying and maintaining database data across multiple servers for redundancy, failover, and read scaling.
Write-Ahead Log (WAL)
A technique where changes are first written to a log before being applied to the database, ensuring crash recovery and data integrity.
Time-Series Database
A database optimized for storing and querying timestamped data points like metrics, sensor readings, and event logs.
Index
A data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on database tables at the cost of additional storage.
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