Postgresql prefix wildcard for full text

Question

I am trying to run a fulltext query using Postgresql that can cater for partial matches using wildcards.

It seems easy enough to have a postfix wildcard after the search term, however I cannot figure out how to specify a prefix wildcard.

For example, I can perform a postfix search easily enough using something like..

SELECT "t1".* 
FROM "t1" 
WHERE (to_tsvector('simple', "t1"."city") @@ to_tsquery('simple', 'don:*') )

should return results matching "London"

However I cant seem to do a prefix search like...

SELECT "t1".* 
FROM "t1" 
WHERE (to_tsvector('simple', "t1"."city") @@ to_tsquery('simple', ':*don') )

Ideally I'd like to have a wildcard prefixed to the front and end of the search term, something like...

SELECT "t1".* 
FROM "t1" 
WHERE (to_tsvector('simple', "t1"."city") @@ to_tsquery('simple', ':*don:*') )

I can use a LIKE condition however I was hoping to benefit from the performance of the full text search features in Postgres.

Answer 1

Full text search is good for finding words, not substrings.

For substring searches you'd better use like '%don%' with pg_trgm extension available from PostgreSQL 9.1 and using gin (column_name gin_trgm_ops) or using gist (column_name gist_trgm_ops) indexes. But your index would be very big (even several times bigger than your table) and write performance not very good.

There's a very good example of using pg_trgm for substring search on select * from depesz blog.