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Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 19:50:29 +0100
From: James Mansion <james@mansionfamily.plus.com>
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To: Alexander Staubo <alex@purefiction.net>
Cc: Andy <frum@ar-sd.net>, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: LIKE search and performance
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	<88daf38c0705230905u1a981102k691b47bd36011a80@mail.gmail.com>
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Alexander Staubo wrote:
> On 5/23/07, Andy <frum@ar-sd.net> wrote:
>> An example would be:
>> SELECT * FROM table
>>                              WHERE name like '%john%' or street like 
>> '%srt%'
>>
>> Anyway, the query planner always does seq scan on the whole table and 
>> that
>> takes some time. How can this be optimized or made in another way to be
>> faster?
>
> There's no algorithm in existence that can "index" arbitrary
> substrings the way you think. The only rational way to accomplish this
> is to first break the text into substrings using some algorithm (eg.,
> words delimited by whitespace and punctuation), and index the
> substrings individually.
That seems rather harsh.  If I'd put an index on each of these colomns 
I'd certainly
expect it to use the indices - and I'm pretty sure that Sybase would.  
I'd expect
it to scan the index leaf pages instead of the table itself - they 
should be much
more compact and also likely to be hot in cache.

Why *wouldn't* the planner do this?

James