Simon Riggs wrote:
Something Tom Dunstan just mentioned has made me ask the question "Why
does our full text search feature look so strange?". It's the
operator-laden syntax that causes the problem.
By any stretch, this query is difficult for most people to understand:
SELECT * FROM text_table
WHERE to_tsvector('fat cats ate fat rats') @@ to_tsquery('fat & rat');
Wouldn't it be much simpler to just have a function, so we can write
this query like this?
SELECT * FROM text_table
WHERE text_search('haystack needle haystack', 'needle');
We then explain to people that while the above is nice, it will presume
that both the function inputs are Text, which isn't any good for complex
searches, indexing and dictionaries etc.., so then we move to:
SELECT * FROM text_table
WHERE text_search('haystack needle haystack'::tsvector,
'needle'::tsquery);
or perhaps
SELECT * FROM text_table
WHERE full_text_search('haystack needle haystack', 'needle & hay');
which would automatically do the conversions to tsvector and tsquery for
us. No more tedious casting, easy to read.
There's a text @@ text operator, so you can write just:
SELECT * FROM tstable where data @@ 'needle';
No need to cast.
Unfortunately, that form can't use a GIN index, I think. But that's
another issue, which I don't think your proposal would fix...
--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
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