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 Backup

The process of creating copies of database data to protect against data loss from failures, corruption, or human error.

Row-Level Security (RLS)

A database feature that restricts which rows a user can access in a table based on security policies.

Connection Pool

A cache of database connections that can be reused, avoiding the overhead of creating new connections for each request.

ORM (Object-Relational Mapping)

A technique that lets you interact with a database using object-oriented code instead of writing raw SQL queries.

Connection String

A formatted string containing all parameters needed to establish a connection to a database server.

A sequence of database operations that are treated as a single unit — either all succeed or all are rolled back.

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