On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Tomas Vondra <t...@fuzzy.cz> wrote:
>
> On 10.10.2014 16:21, Craig James wrote:
> > Our index is for chemical structures. Chemicals are indexed on
> > chemical fragments
> > <http://emolecules.com/info/molecular-informatics>. A search
> > typically starts with 50-200 indexed "columns" (chemical fragments).
> > The query is always flat, "A and B and ... and Z". The indexed
> > fragments are both correlated (the existence of one strongly raises
> > the chances of another) and anti-correlated (certain combinations are
> > very rare).
>
> Maybe I don't understand the problem well enough, but isn't this a
> perfect match for GIN indexes? I mean, you essentially need to do
> queries like "WHERE substance @@ ('A & B & !C')" etc. Which is exactly
> what GIN does, because it keeps pointers to tuples for each fragment.
>
On the day our web site opened we were using tsearch. Before the end of the
day we realized it was a bad idea, for the very reasons discussed here. The
early-abort/late-start problem ("offset N limit M") could take minutes to
return the requested page. With the external dynamically-optimized index,
we can almost always get answers in less than a couple seconds, often in
0.1 seconds.
Craig
