I have a database and want to be able to look up in a table a search that's something like: select * from table where column like "abc%def%ghi" or select * from table where column like "%def%ghi" Is there a way to index the column so that this isn't too slow?
Edit: Can I also clarify that the database is read only and won't be updated often.
Options for text search and indexing include:
full-text indexing with dictionary based search, including support for prefix-search, eg to_tsvector(mycol) @@ to_tsquery('search:*')
text_pattern_ops indexes to support prefix string matches eg LIKE 'abc%' but not infix searches like %blah%;. A reverse()d index may be used for suffix searching.
pg_tgrm trigram indexes on newer versions as demonstrated in this recent dba.stackexchange.com post.
An external search and indexing tool like Apache Solr.
From the minimal information given above, I'd say that only a trigram index will be able to help you, since you're doing infix searches on a string and not looking for dictionary words. Unfortunately, trigram indexes are huge and rather inefficient; don't expect some kind of magical performance boost, and keep in mind that they take a lot of work for the database engine to build and keep up to date.
If you need just to, for instance, get unique substrings in an entire table, you can create a substring index:
CREATE INDEX i_test_sbstr ON tablename (substring(columname, 5, 3));
-- start at position 5, go for 3 characters
It is important that the substring() parameters in the index definition are
the same as you use in your query.
For the like operator use one of the operator classes varchar_pattern_ops or text_pattern_ops
create index test_index on test_table (col varchar_pattern_ops);
That will only work if the pattern does not start with a % in which case another strategy is required.
