Simon Willison’s Weblog

PostgreSQL 7.4

Last week’s release of PostgreSQL 7.4 made a great open source project even better—it even managed to impress hard-core MySQL advocate Jeremy Zawodny. The detailed release notes show that most of the improvements were with regards to performance, but the thing that really caught my eye was tsearch2, the new full text indexing suite. A bit of digging brought up the CVS tree for the new module, which in turn lead me to this tutorial style overview of its capabilities.

I make extensive use of MySQL’s built in full text indexing on this blog for both the search engine and the “related entries” lists, so it’s a feature I’ve really been missing in my experiments with PostgreSQL.