Basic Text Matching

Full text search in MogDB is based on the match operator @@, which returns true if a tsvector (document) matches a tsquery (query). It does not matter which data type is written first:

MogDB=# SELECT 'a fat cat sat on a mat and ate a fat rat'::tsvector @@ 'cat & rat'::tsquery AS RESULT;
 result
----------
 t
(1 row)
MogDB=# SELECT 'fat & cow'::tsquery @@ 'a fat cat sat on a mat and ate a fat rat'::tsvector AS RESULT;
 result
----------
 f
(1 row)

As the above example suggests, a tsquery is not raw text, any more than a tsvector is. A tsquery contains search terms, which must be already-normalized lexemes, and may combine multiple terms using AND, OR, and NOT operators. For details, see Text Search Types. There are functions to_tsquery and plainto_tsquery that are helpful in converting user-written text into a proper tsquery, for example by normalizing words appearing in the text. Similarly, to_tsvector is used to parse and normalize a document string. So in practice a text search match would look more like this:

MogDB=# SELECT to_tsvector('fat cats ate fat rats') @@ to_tsquery('fat & rat') AS RESULT;
result
----------
 t
(1 row)

Observe that this match would not succeed if written as follows:

MogDB=# SELECT 'fat cats ate fat rats'::tsvector @@ to_tsquery('fat & rat')AS RESULT;
result
----------
 f
(1 row)

In the preceding match, no normalization of the word rats will occur. Therefore, rats does not match rat.

The @@ operator also supports text input, allowing explicit conversion of a text string to tsvector or tsquery to be skipped in simple cases. The variants available are:

tsvector @@ tsquery
tsquery  @@ tsvector
text @@ tsquery
text @@ text

We already saw the first two of these. The form text @@ tsquery is equivalent to to_tsvector(text) @@ tsquery. The form text @@ text is equivalent to to_tsvector(text) @@ plainto_tsquery(text).