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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><title>tsearch-v2-intro</title>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="tsearch-V2-intro_files/tsearch.txt"></head>
<body>
<div class="content">
<h2>Tsearch2 - Introduction</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.sai.msu.su/%7Emegera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/docs/tsearch-V2-intro.html">
[Online version]</a> of this document is available.</p>
<p>The tsearch2 module is available to add as an extension to
the PostgreSQL database to allow for Full Text Indexing. This
document is an introduction to installing, configuring, using
and maintaining the database with the tsearch2 module
activated.</p>
<p>Please, note, tsearch2 module is fully incompatible with old
tsearch, which is deprecated in 7.4 and will be obsoleted in
7.5.</p>
<h3>USING TSEARCH2 AND POSTGRESQL FOR A WEB BASED SEARCH
ENGINE</h3>
<p>This documentation is provided as a short guide on how to
quickly get up and running with tsearch2 and PostgreSQL, for
those who want to implement a full text indexed based search
engine. It is not meant to be a complete in-depth guide into
the full ins and outs of the contrib/tsearch2 module, and is
primarily aimed at beginners who want to speed up searching of
large text fields, or those migrating from other database
systems such as MS-SQL.</p>
<p>The README.tsearch2 file included in the contrib/tsearch2
directory contains a brief overview and history behind tsearch.
This can also be found online <a href="http://www.sai.msu.su/%7Emegera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/">[right
here]</a>.</p>
<p>Further in depth documentation such as a full function
reference, and user guide can be found online at the <a href="http://www.sai.msu.su/%7Emegera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/docs/">[tsearch
documentation home]</a>.</p>
<h3>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</h3>
<p>Robert John Shepherd originally wrote this documentation for
the previous version of tsearch module (v1) included with the
postgres release. I took his documentation and updated it to
comply with the tsearch2 modifications.</p>
<p>Robert's original acknowledgements:</p>
<p>"Thanks to Oleg Bartunov for taking the time to answer many
of my questions regarding this module, and also to Teodor
Sigaev for clearing up the process of making your own
dictionaries. Plus of course a big thanks to the pair of them
for writing this module in the first place!"</p>
<p>I would also like to extend my thanks to the developers, and
Oleg Bartunov for all of his direction and help with the new
features of tsearch2.</p>
<h3>OVERVIEW</h3>
<p>MS-SQL provides a full text indexing (FTI) system which
enables the fast searching of text based fields, very useful
for websites (and other applications) that require a results
set based on key words. PostgreSQL ships with a contributed
module called tsearch2, which implements a special type of
index that can also be used for full text indexing. Further
more, unlike MS' offering which requires regular incremental
rebuilds of the text indexes themselves, tsearch2 indexes are
always up-to-date and keeping them so induces very little
overhead.</p>
<p>Before we get into the details, it is recommended that you
have installed and tested PostgreSQL, are reasonably familiar
with databases, the SQL query language and also understand the
basics of connecting to PostgreSQL from the local shell. This
document isn't intended for the complete PostgreSQL newbie, but
anyone with a reasonable grasp of the basics should be able to
follow it.</p>
<h3>INSTALLATION</h3>
<p>Starting with PostgreSQL version 7.4 tsearch2 is now
included in the contrib directory with the PostgreSQL sources.
contrib/tsearch2 is where you will find everything needed to
install and use tsearch2. Please note that tsearch2 will also
work with PostgreSQL version 7.3.x, but it is not the module
included with the source distribution. You will have to
download the module separately and install it in the same
fashion.</p>
<p>I installed the tsearch2 module to a PostgreSQL 7.3 database
from the contrib directory without squashing the original (old)
tsearch module. What I did was move the modules tsearch src
driectory into the contrib tree under the name tsearchV2.</p>
<p>Step one is to download the tsearch V2 module :</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sai.msu.su/%7Emegera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/">[http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/]</a>
(check Development History for latest stable version !)</p>
<pre> tar -zxvf tsearch-v2.tar.gz
mv tsearch2 PGSQL_SRC/contrib/
cd PGSQL_SRC/contrib/tsearch2
</pre>
<p>If you are installing from PostgreSQL version 7.4 or higher,
you can skip those steps and just change to the
contrib/tsearch2 directory in the source tree and continue from
there.</p>
<p>Then continue with the regular building and installation
process</p>
<pre> gmake
gmake install
gmake installcheck
</pre>
<p>That is pretty much all you have to do, unless of course you
get errors. However if you get those, you better go check with
the mailing lists over at <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/">http://www.postgresql.org</a> or
<a href="http://openfts.sourceforge.net/">http://openfts.sourceforge.net/</a>
since its never failed for me.</p>
<p>The directory in the contib/ and the directory from the
archive is called tsearch2. Tsearch2 is completely incompatible
with the previous version of tsearch. This means that both
versions can be installed into a single database, and migration
the new version may be much easier.</p>
<p>NOTE: the previous version of tsearch found in the
contrib/tsearch directory is depricated. ALthough it is still
available and included within PostgreSQL version 7.4. It will
be removed in version 7.5.</p>
<h3>ADDING TSEARCH2 FUNCTIONALITY TO A DATABASE</h3>
<p>We should create a database to use as an example for the
remainder of this file. We can call the database "ftstest". You
can create it from the command line like this:</p>
<pre> #createdb ftstest
</pre>
<p>If you thought installation was easy, this next bit is even
easier. Change to the PGSQL_SRC/contrib/tsearch2 directory and
type:</p>
<pre> psql ftstest < tsearch2.sql
</pre>
<p>The file "tsearch2.sql" holds all the wonderful little
goodies you need to do full text indexing. It defines numerous
functions and operators, and creates the needed tables in the
database. There will be 4 new tables created after running the
tsearch2.sql file : pg_ts_dict, pg_ts_parser, pg_ts_cfg,
pg_ts_cfgmap are added.</p>
<p>You can check out the tables if you like:</p>
<pre> #psql ftstest
ftstest=# \d
List of relations
Schema | Name | Type | Owner
--------+--------------+-------+----------
public | pg_ts_cfg | table | kopciuch
public | pg_ts_cfgmap | table | kopciuch
public | pg_ts_dict | table | kopciuch
public | pg_ts_parser | table | kopciuch
(4 rows)
</pre>
<h3>TYPES AND FUNCTIONS PROVIDED BY TSEARCH2</h3>
<p>The first thing we can do is try out some of the types that
are provided for us. Lets look at the tsvector type provided
for us:</p>
<pre> SELECT 'Our first string used today'::tsvector;
tsvector
---------------------------------------
'Our' 'used' 'first' 'today' 'string'
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>The results are the words used within our string. Notice
they are not in any particular order. The tsvector type returns
a string of space separated words.</p>
<pre> SELECT 'Our first string used today first string'::tsvector;
tsvector
-----------------------------------------------
'Our' 'used' 'again' 'first' 'today' 'string'
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>Notice the results string has each unique word ('first' and
'string' only appear once in the tsvector value). Which of
course makes sense if you are searching the full text ... you
only need to know each unique word in the text.</p>
<p>Those examples were just casting a text field to that of
type tsvector. Lets check out one of the new functions created
by the tsearch2 module.</p>
<p>The function to_tsvector has 3 possible signatures:</p>
<pre> to_tsvector(oid, text);
to_tsvector(text, text);
to_tsvector(text);
</pre>
<p>We will use the second method using two text fields. The
overloaded methods provide us with a way to specifiy the way
the searchable text is broken up into words (Stemming process).
Right now we will specify the 'default' configuration. See the
section on TSEARCH2 CONFIGURATION to learn more about this.</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('default',
'Our first string used today first string');
to_tsvector
--------------------------------------------
'use':4 'first':2,6 'today':5 'string':3,7
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>The result returned from this function is of type tsvector.
The results came about by this reasoning: All of the words in
the text passed in are stemmed, or not used because they are
stop words defined in our configuration. Each lower case
morphed word is returned with all of the positons in the
text.</p>
<p>In this case the word "Our" is a stop word in the default
configuration. That means it will not be included in the
result. The word "first" is found at positions 2 and 6
(although "Our" is a stop word, it's position is maintained).
The word(s) positioning is maintained exactly as in the
original string. The word "used" is morphed to the word "use"
based on the default configuration for word stemming, and is
found at position 4. The rest of the results follow the same
logic. Just a reminder again ... the order of the 'word'
position in the output is not in any kind of order. (ie 'use':4
appears first)</p>
<p>If you want to view the output of the tsvector fields
without their positions, you can do so with the function
"strip(tsvector)".</p>
<pre> SELECT strip(to_tsvector('default',
'Our first string used today first string'));
strip
--------------------------------
'use' 'first' 'today' 'string'
</pre>
<p>If you wish to know the number of unique words returned in
the tsvector you can do so by using the function
"length(tsvector)"</p>
<pre> SELECT length(to_tsvector('default',
'Our first string used today first string'));
length
--------
4
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>Lets take a look at the function to_tsquery. It also has 3
signatures which follow the same rational as the to_tsvector
function:</p>
<pre> to_tsquery(oid, text);
to_tsquery(text, text);
to_tsquery(text);
</pre>
<p>Lets try using the function with a single word :</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsquery('default', 'word');
to_tsquery
-----------
'word'
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>I call the function the same way I would a to_tsvector
function, specifying the 'default' configuration for morphing,
and the result is the stemmed output 'word'.</p>
<p>Lets attempt to use the function with a string of multiple
words:</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsquery('default', 'this is many words');
ERROR: Syntax error
</pre>
<p>The function can not accept a space separated string. The
intention of the to_tsquery function is to return a type of
"tsquery" used for searching a tsvector field. What we need to
do is search for one to many words with some kind of logic (for
now simple boolean).</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsquery('default', 'searching|sentence');
to_tsquery
----------------------
'search' | 'sentenc'
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>Notice that the words are separated by the boolean logic
"OR", the text could contain boolean operators &,|,!,()
with their usual meaning.</p>
<p>You can not use words defined as being a stop word in your
configuration. The function will not fail ... you will just get
no result, and a NOTICE like this:</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsquery('default', 'a|is&not|!the');
NOTICE: Query contains only stopword(s)
or doesn't contain lexem(s), ignored
to_tsquery
-----------
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>That is a beginning to using the types, and functions
defined in the tsearch2 module. There are numerous more
functions that I have not touched on. You can read through the
tsearch2.sql file built when compiling to get more familiar
with what is included.</p>
<h3>INDEXING FIELDS IN A TABLE</h3>
<p>The next stage is to add a full text index to an existing
table. In this example we already have a table defined as
follows:</p>
<pre> CREATE TABLE tblMessages
(
intIndex int4,
strTopic varchar(100),
strMessage text
);
</pre>
<p>We are assuming there are several rows with some kind of
data in them. Any data will do, just do several inserts with
test strings for a topic, and a message. here is some test data
I inserted. (yes I know it's completely useless stuff ;-) but
it will serve our purpose right now).</p>
<pre> INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('1', 'Testing Topic', 'Testing message data input');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('2', 'Movie', 'Breakfast at Tiffany\'s');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('3', 'Famous Author', 'Stephen King');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('4', 'Political Topic',
'Nelson Mandella is released from prison');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('5', 'Nursery rhyme phrase',
'Little jack horner sat in a corner');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('6', 'Gettysburg address quotation',
'Four score and seven years ago'
' our fathers brought forth on this'
' continent a new nation, conceived in'
' liberty and dedicated to the proposition'
' that all men are created equal');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('7', 'Classic Rock Bands',
'Led Zeppelin Grateful Dead and The Sex Pistols');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('8', 'My birth address',
'18 Sommervile road, Regina, Saskatchewan');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('9', 'Joke', 'knock knock : who\'s there?'
' I will not finish this joke');
INSERT INTO tblMessages
VALUES ('10', 'Computer information',
'My computer is a pentium III 400 mHz'
' with 192 megabytes of RAM');
</pre>
<p>The next stage is to create a special text index which we
will use for FTI, so we can search our table of messages for
words or a phrase. We do this using the SQL command:</p>
<pre> ALTER TABLE tblMessages ADD COLUMN idxFTI tsvector;
</pre>
<p>Note that unlike traditional indexes, this is actually a new
field in the same table, which is then used (through the magic
of the tsearch2 operators and functions) by a special index we
will create in a moment.</p>
<p>The general rule for the initial insertion of data will
follow four steps:</p>
<pre> 1. update table
2. vacuum full analyze
3. create index
4. vacuum full analyze
</pre>
<p>The data can be updated into the table, the vacuum full
analyze will reclaim unused space. The index can be created on
the table after the data has been inserted. Having the index
created prior to the update will slow down the process. It can
be done in that manner, this way is just more efficient. After
the index has been created on the table, vacuum full analyze is
run again to update postgres's statistics (ie having the index
take effect).</p>
<pre> UPDATE tblMessages SET idxFTI=to_tsvector('default', strMessage);
VACUUM FULL ANALYZE;
</pre>
<p>Note that this only inserts the field strMessage as a
tsvector, so if you want to also add strTopic to the
information stored, you should instead do the following, which
effectively concatenates the two fields into one before being
inserted into the table:</p>
<pre> UPDATE tblMessages
SET idxFTI=to_tsvector('default',coalesce(strTopic,'') ||' '|| coalesce(strMessage,''));
VACUUM FULL ANALYZE;
</pre>
<p><strong>Using the coalesce function makes sure this
concatenation also works with NULL fields.</strong></p>
<p>We need to create the index on the column idxFTI. Keep in
mind that the database will update the index when some action
is taken. In this case we _need_ the index (The whole point of
Full Text INDEXINGi ;-)), so don't worry about any indexing
overhead. We will create an index based on the gist function.
GiST is an index structure for Generalized Search Tree.</p>
<pre> CREATE INDEX idxFTI_idx ON tblMessages USING gist(idxFTI);
VACUUM FULL ANALYZE;
</pre>
<p>After you have converted all of your data and indexed the
column, you can select some rows to see what actually happened.
I will not display output here but you can play around
yourselves and see what happened.</p>
<p>The last thing to do is set up a trigger so every time a row
in this table is changed, the text index is automatically
updated. This is easily done using:</p>
<pre> CREATE TRIGGER tsvectorupdate BEFORE UPDATE OR INSERT ON tblMessages
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE tsearch2(idxFTI, strMessage);
</pre>
<p>Or if you are indexing both strMessage and strTopic you
should instead do:</p>
<pre> CREATE TRIGGER tsvectorupdate BEFORE UPDATE OR INSERT ON tblMessages
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE
tsearch2(idxFTI, strTopic, strMessage);
</pre>
<p>Before you ask, the tsearch2 function accepts multiple
fields as arguments so there is no need to concatenate the two
into one like we did before.</p>
<p>If you want to do something specific with columns, you may
write your very own trigger function using plpgsql or other
procedural languages (but not SQL, unfortunately) and use it
instead of <em>tsearch2</em> trigger.</p>
<p>You could however call other stored procedures from within
the tsearch2 function. Lets say we want to create a function to
remove certain characters (like the @ symbol from all
text).</p>
<pre> CREATE FUNCTION dropatsymbol(text)
RETURNS text AS 'select replace($1, \'@\', \' \');' LANGUAGE SQL;
</pre>
<p>Now we can use this function within the tsearch2 function on
the trigger.</p>
<pre> DROP TRIGGER tsvectorupdate ON tblmessages;
CREATE TRIGGER tsvectorupdate BEFORE UPDATE OR INSERT ON tblMessages
FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE tsearch2(idxFTI, dropatsymbol, strMessage);
INSERT INTO tblmessages VALUES (69, 'Attempt for dropatsymbol', 'Test@test.com');
</pre>
<p>If at this point you receive an error stating: ERROR: Can't
find tsearch config by locale</p>
<p>Do not worry. You have done nothing wrong. And tsearch2 is
not broken. All that has happened here is that the
configuration is setup to use a configuration based on the
locale of the server. All you have to do is change your default
configuration, or add a new one for your specific locale. See
the section on TSEARCH2 CONFIGURATION.</p>
<pre class="real"> SELECT * FROM tblmessages WHERE intindex = 69;
intindex | strtopic | strmessage | idxfti
----------+--------------------------+---------------+-----------------------
69 | Attempt for dropatsymbol | Test@test.com | 'test':1 'test.com':2
(1 row)
</pre>Notice that the string content was passed throught the stored
procedure dropatsymbol. The '@' character was replaced with a
single space ... and the output from the procedure was then stored
in the tsvector column.
<p>This could be useful for removing other characters from
indexed text, or any kind of preprocessing needed to be done on
the text prior to insertion into the index.</p>
<h3>QUERYING A TABLE</h3>
<p>There are some examples in the README.tsearch2 file for
querying a table. One major difference between tsearch and
tsearch2 is the operator ## is no longer available. Only the
operator @@ is defined, using the types tsvector on one side
and tsquery on the other side.</p>
<p>Lets search the indexed data for the word "Test". I indexed
based on the the concatenation of the strTopic, and the
strMessage:</p>
<pre> SELECT intindex, strtopic FROM tblmessages
WHERE idxfti @@ 'test'::tsquery;
intindex | strtopic
----------+---------------
1 | Testing Topic
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>The only result that matched was the row with a topic
"Testing Topic". Notice that the word I search for was all
lowercase. Let's see what happens when I query for uppercase
"Test".</p>
<pre> SELECT intindex, strtopic FROM tblmessages
WHERE idxfti @@ 'Test'::tsquery;
intindex | strtopic
----------+----------
(0 rows)
</pre>
<p>We get zero rows returned. The reason is because when the
text was inserted, it was morphed to my default configuration
(because of the call to to_tsvector in the UPDATE statement).
If there was no morphing done, and the tsvector field(s)
contained the word 'Text', a match would have been found.</p>
<p>Most likely the best way to query the field is to use the
to_tsquery function on the right hand side of the @@ operator
like this:</p>
<pre> SELECT intindex, strtopic FROM tblmessages
WHERE idxfti @@ to_tsquery('default', 'Test | Zeppelin');
intindex | strtopic
----------+--------------------
1 | Testing Topic
7 | Classic Rock Bands
(2 rows)
</pre>
<p>That query searched for all instances of "Test" OR
"Zeppelin". It returned two rows: the "Testing Topic" row, and
the "Classic Rock Bands" row. The to_tsquery function performed
the correct morphology upon the parameters, and searched the
tsvector field appropriately.</p>
<p>The last example here relates to searching for a phrase, for
example "minority report". This poses a problem with regard to
tsearch2, as it doesn't index phrases, only words. But there is
a way around which doesn't appear to have a significant impact
on query time, and that is to use a query such as the
following:</p>
<pre> SELECT intindex, strTopic FROM tblmessages
WHERE idxfti @@ to_tsquery('default', 'gettysburg & address')
AND strMessage ~* '.*men are created equal.*';
intindex | strtopic
----------+------------------------------
6 | Gettysburg address quotation
(1 row)
SELECT intindex, strTopic FROM tblmessages
WHERE idxfti @@ to_tsquery('default', 'gettysburg & address')
AND strMessage ~* '.*something that does not exist.*';
intindex | strtopic
----------+----------
(0 rows)
</pre>
<p>Of course if your indexing both strTopic and strMessage, and
want to search for this phrase on both, then you will have to
get out the brackets and extend this query a little more.</p>
<h3>TSEARCH2 CONFIGURATION</h3>
<p>Some words such as "and", "the", and "who" are automatically
not indexed, since they belong to a pre-existing dictionary of
"Stop Words" which tsearch2 does not perform indexing on. If
someone needs to search for "The Who" in your database, they
are going to have a tough time coming up with any results,
since both are ignored in the indexes. But there is a
solution.</p>
<p>Lets say we want to add a word into the stop word list for
english stemming. We could edit the file
:'/usr/local/pgsql/share/english.stop' and add a word to the
list. I edited mine to exclude my name from indexing:</p>
<pre> - Edit /usr/local/pgsql/share/english.stop
- Add 'andy' to the list
- Save the file.
</pre>
<p>When you connect to the database, the dict_init procedure is
run during initialization. And in my configuration it will read
the stop words from the file I just edited. If you were
connected to the DB while editing the stop words, you will need
to end the current session and re-connect. When you re-connect
to the database, 'andy' is no longer indexed:</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('default', 'Andy');
to_tsvector
------------
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>Originally I would get the result :</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('default', 'Andy');
to_tsvector
------------
'andi':1
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>But since I added it as a stop word, it would be ingnored on
the indexing. The stop word added was used in the dictionary
"en_stem". If I were to use a different configuration such as
'simple', the results would be different. There are no stop
words for the simple dictionary. It will just convert to lower
case, and index every unique word.</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('simple', 'Andy andy The the in out');
to_tsvector
-------------------------------------
'in':5 'out':6 'the':3,4 'andy':1,2
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>All this talk about which configuration to use is leading us
into the actual configuration of tsearch2. In the examples in
this document the configuration has always been specified when
using the tsearch2 functions:</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('default', 'Testing the default config');
SELECT to_tsvector('simple', 'Example of simple Config');
</pre>
<p>The pg_ts_cfg table holds each configuration you can use
with the tsearch2 functions. As you can see the ts_name column
contains both the 'default' configurations based on the 'C'
locale. And the 'simple' configuration which is not based on
any locale.</p>
<pre> SELECT * from pg_ts_cfg;
ts_name | prs_name | locale
-----------------+----------+--------------
default | default | C
default_russian | default | ru_RU.KOI8-R
simple | default |
(3 rows)
</pre>
<p>Each row in the pg_ts_cfg table contains the name of the
tsearch2 configuration, the name of the parser to use, and the
locale mapped to the configuration. There is only one parser to
choose from the table pg_ts_parser called 'default'. More
parsers could be written, but for our needs we will use the
default.</p>
<p>There are 3 configurations installed by tsearch2 initially.
If your locale is set to 'en_US' for example (like my laptop),
then as you can see there is currently no dictionary configured
to use with that locale. You can either set up a new
configuration or just use one that already exists. If I do not
specify which configuration to use in the to_tsvector function,
I receive the following error.</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('learning tsearch is like going to school');
ERROR: Can't find tsearch config by locale
</pre>
<p>We will create a new configuration for use with the server
encoding 'en_US'. The first step is to add a new configuration
into the pg_ts_cfg table. We will call the configuration
'default_english', with the default parser and use the locale
'en_US'.</p>
<pre> INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfg (ts_name, prs_name, locale)
VALUES ('default_english', 'default', 'en_US');
</pre>
<p>We have only declared that there is a configuration called
'default_english'. We need to set the configuration of how
'default_english' will work. The next step is creating a new
dictionary to use. The configuration of the dictionary is
completlely different in tsearch2. In the prior versions to
make changes, you would have to re-compile your changes into
the tsearch.so. All of the configuration has now been moved
into the system tables created by executing the SQL code from
tsearch2.sql</p>
<p>Lets take a first look at the pg_ts_dict table</p>
<pre> ftstest=# \d pg_ts_dict
Table "public.pg_ts_dict"
Column | Type | Modifiers
-----------------+---------+-----------
dict_name | text | not null
dict_init | oid |
dict_initoption | text |
dict_lexize | oid | not null
dict_comment | text |
Indexes: pg_ts_dict_idx unique btree (dict_name)
</pre>
<p>The dict_name column is the name of the dictionary, for
example 'simple', 'en_stem' or 'ru_stem'. The dict_init column
is an OID of a stored procedure to run for initialization of
that dictionary, for example 'snb_en_init' or 'snb_ru_init'.
The dict_init option is used for options passed to the init
function for the stored procedure. In the cases of 'en_stem' or
'ru_stem' it is a path to a stopword file for that dictionary,
for example '/usr/local/pgsql/share/english.stop'. This is
however dictated by the dictionary. ISpell dictionaries may
require different options. The dict_lemmatize column is another
OID of a stored procedure to the function used to lemmitize,
for example 'snb_lemmatize'. The dict_comment column is just a
comment.</p>
<p>Next we will configure the use of a new dictionary based on
ISpell. We will assume you have ISpell installed on you
machine. (in /usr/local/lib)</p>
<p>There has been some confusion in the past as to which files
are used from ISpell. ISpell operates using a hash file. This
is a binary file created by the ISpell command line utility
"buildhash". This utility accepts a file containing the words
from the dictionary, and the affixes file and the output is the
hash file. The default installation of ISPell installs the
english hash file english.hash, which is the exact same file as
american.hash. ISpell uses this as the fallback dictionary to
use.</p>
<p>This hash file is not what tsearch2 requires as the ISpell
interface. The file(s) needed are those used to create the
hash. Tsearch uses the dictionary words for morphology, so the
listing is needed not spellchecking. Regardless, these files
are included in the ISpell sources, and you can use them to
integrate into tsearch2. This is not complicated, but is not
very obvious to begin with. The tsearch2 ISpell interface needs
only the listing of dictionary words, it will parse and load
those words, and use the ISpell dictionary for lexem
processing.</p>
<p>I found the ISPell make system to be very finicky. Their
documentation actually states this to be the case. So I just
did things the command line way. In the ISpell source tree
under langauges/english there are several files in this
directory. For a complete description, please read the ISpell
README. Basically for the english dictionary there is the
option to create the small, medium, large and extra large
dictionaries. The medium dictionary is recommended. If the make
system is configured correctly, it would build and install the
english.has file from the medium size dictionary. Since we are
only concerned with the dictionary word listing ... it can be
created from the /languages/english directory with the
following command:</p>
<pre> sort -u -t/ +0f -1 +0 -T /usr/tmp -o english.med english.0 english.1
</pre>
<p>This will create a file called english.med. You can copy
this file to whever you like. I place mine in /usr/local/lib so
it coincides with the ISpell hash files. You can now add the
tsearch2 configuration entry for the ISpell english dictionary.
We will also continue to use the english word stop file that
was installed for the en_stem dictionary. You could use a
different one if you like. The ISpell configuration is based on
the "ispell_template" dictionary installed by default with
tsearch2. We will use the OIDs to the stored procedures from
the row where the dict_name = 'ispell_template'.</p>
<pre> INSERT INTO pg_ts_dict
(SELECT 'en_ispell',
dict_init,
'DictFile="/usr/local/lib/english.med",'
'AffFile="/usr/local/lib/english.aff",'
'StopFile="/usr/local/pgsql/share/english.stop"',
dict_lexize
FROM pg_ts_dict
WHERE dict_name = 'ispell_template');
</pre>
<p>Now that we have a dictionary we can specify it's use in a
query to get a lexem. For this we will use the lexize function.
The lexize function takes the name of the dictionary to use as
an argument. Just as the other tsearch2 functions operate.</p>
<pre> SELECT lexize('en_ispell', 'program');
lexize
-----------
{program}
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>If you wanted to always use the ISpell english dictionary
you have installed, you can configure tsearch2 to always use a
specific dictionary.</p>
<pre> SELCECT set_curdict('en_ispell');
</pre>
<p>Lexize is meant to turn a word into a lexem. It is possible
to receive more than one lexem returned for a single word.</p>
<pre> SELECT lexize('en_ispell', 'conditionally');
lexize
-----------------------------
{conditionally,conditional}
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>The lexize function is not meant to take a full string as an
argument to return lexems for. If you passed in an entire
sentence, it attempts to find that entire sentence in the
dictionary. SInce the dictionary contains only words, you will
receive an empty result set back.</p>
<pre> SELECT lexize('en_ispell', 'This is a senctece to lexize');
lexize
--------
(1 row)
If you parse a lexem from a word not in the dictionary, then you will receive an empty result. This makes sense because the word "tsearch" is not int the english dictionary. You can create your own additions to the dictionary if you like. This may be useful for scientific or technical glossaries that need to be indexed. SELECT lexize('en_ispell', 'tsearch'); lexize -------- (1 row)
</pre>
<p>This is not to say that tsearch will be ignored when adding
text information to the the tsvector index column. This will be
explained in greater detail with the table pg_ts_cfgmap.</p>
<p>Next we need to set up the configuration for mapping the
dictionay use to the lexxem parsings. This will be done by
altering the pg_ts_cfgmap table. We will insert several rows,
specifying to using the new dictionary we installed and
configured for use within tsearch2. There are several type of
lexims we would be concerned with forcing the use of the ISpell
dictionary.</p>
<pre> INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap (ts_name, tok_alias, dict_name)
VALUES ('default_english', 'lhword', '{en_ispell,en_stem}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap (ts_name, tok_alias, dict_name)
VALUES ('default_english', 'lpart_hword', '{en_ispell,en_stem}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap (ts_name, tok_alias, dict_name)
VALUES ('default_english', 'lword', '{en_ispell,en_stem}');
</pre>
<p>We have just inserted 3 records to the configuration
mapping, specifying that the lexem types for "lhword,
lpart_hword and lword" are to be stemmed using the 'en_ispell'
dictionary we added into pg_ts_dict, when using the
configuration ' default_english' which we added to
pg_ts_cfg.</p>
<p>There are several other lexem types used that we do not need
to specify as using the ISpell dictionary. We can simply insert
values using the 'simple' stemming process dictionary.</p>
<pre> INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'url', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'host', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'sfloat', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'uri', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'int', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'float', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'email', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'word', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'hword', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'nlword', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'nlpart_hword', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'part_hword', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'nlhword', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'file', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'uint', '{simple}');
INSERT INTO pg_ts_cfgmap
VALUES ('default_english', 'version', '{simple}');
</pre>
<p>Our addition of a configuration for 'default_english' is now
complete. We have successfully created a new tsearch2
configuration. At the same time we have also set the new
configuration to be our default for en_US locale.</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('default_english',
'learning tsearch is like going to school');
to_tsvector
--------------------------------------------------
'go':5 'like':4 'learn':1 'school':7 'tsearch':2
SELECT to_tsvector('learning tsearch is like going to school');
to_tsvector
--------------------------------------------------
'go':5 'like':4 'learn':1 'school':7 'tsearch':2
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>Notice here that words like "tsearch" are still parsed and
indexed in the tsvector column. There is a lexem returned for
the word becuase in the configuration mapping table, we specify
words to be used from the 'en_ispell' dictionary first, but as
a fallback to use the 'en_stem' dictionary. Therefore a lexem
is not returned from en_ispell, but is returned from en_stem,
and added to the tsvector.</p>
<pre> SELECT to_tsvector('learning tsearch is like going to computer school');
to_tsvector
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
'go':5 'like':4 'learn':1 'school':8 'compute':7 'tsearch':2 'computer':7
(1 row)
</pre>
<p>Notice in this last example I added the word "computer" to
the text to be converted into a tsvector. Because we have setup
our default configuration to use the ISpell english dictionary,
the words are lexized, and computer returns 2 lexems at the
same position. 'compute':7 and 'computer':7 are now both
indexed for the word computer.</p>
<p>You can create additional dictionarynlists, or use the extra
large dictionary from ISpell. You can read through the ISpell
documents, and source tree to make modifications as you see
fit.</p>
<p>In the case that you already have a configuration set for
the locale, and you are changing it to your new dictionary
configuration. You will have to set the old locale to NULL. If
we are using the 'C' locale then we would do this:</p>
<pre> UPDATE pg_ts_cfg SET locale=NULL WHERE locale = 'C';
</pre>
<p>That about wraps up the configuration of tsearch2. There is
much more you can do with the tables provided. This was just an
introduction to get things working rather quickly.</p>
<h3>ADDING NEW DICTIONARIES TO TSEARCH2</h3>
<p>To aid in the addition of new dictionaries to the tsearch2
module you can use another additional module in combination
with tsearch2. The gendict module is included into tsearch2
distribution and is available from gendict/ subdirectory.</p>
<p>I will not go into detail about installation and
instructions on how to use gendict to it's fullest extent right
now. You can read the README.gendict ... it has all of the
instructions and information you will need.</p>
<h3>BACKING UP AND RESTORING DATABASES THAT FEATURE
TSEARCH2</h3>
<p>Believe it or not, this isn't as straight forward as it
should be, and you will have problems trying to backup and
restore any database which uses tsearch2 unless you take the
steps shown below. And before you ask using pg_dumpall will
result in failure every time. These took a lot of trial and
error to get working, but the process as laid down below has
been used a dozen times now in live production environments so
it should work fine.</p>
<p>HOWEVER never rely on anyone elses instructions to backup
and restore a database system, always develop and understand
your own methodology, and test it numerous times before you
need to do it for real.</p>
<p>To Backup a PostgreSQL database that uses the tsearch2
module:</p>
<p>1) Backup any global database objects such as users and
groups (this step is usually only necessary when you will be
restoring to a virgin system)</p>
<pre> pg_dumpall -g > GLOBALobjects.sql
</pre>
<p>2) Backup the full database schema using pg_dump</p>
<pre> pg_dump -s DATABASE > DATABASEschema.sql
</pre>
<p>3) Backup the full database using pg_dump</p>
<pre> pg_dump -Fc DATABASE > DATABASEdata.tar
</pre>
<p>To Restore a PostgreSQL database that uses the tsearch2
module:</p>
<p>1) Create the blank database</p>
<pre> createdb DATABASE
</pre>
<p>2) Restore any global database objects such as users and
groups (this step is usually only necessary when you will be
restoring to a virgin system)</p>
<pre> psql DATABASE < GLOBALobjects.sql
</pre>
<p>3) Create the tsearch2 objects, functions and operators</p>
<pre> psql DATABASE < tsearch2.sql
</pre>
<p>4) Edit the backed up database schema and delete all SQL
commands which create tsearch2 related functions, operators and
data types, BUT NOT fields in table definitions that specify
tsvector types. If your not sure what these are, they are the
ones listed in tsearch2.sql. Then restore the edited schema to
the database</p>
<pre> psql DATABASE < DATABASEschema.sql
</pre>
<p>5) Restore the data for the database</p>
<pre> pg_restore -N -a -d DATABASE DATABASEdata.tar
</pre>
<p>If you get any errors in step 4, it will most likely be
because you forgot to remove an object that was created in
tsearch2.sql. Any errors in step 5 will mean the database
schema was probably restored wrongly.</p>
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