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PostgreSQL Glossary

Full-Text Search

A technique for searching text data that goes beyond simple pattern matching to include linguistic analysis. Example: PostgreSQL's full-text search can fi…

Definition

A technique for searching text data that goes beyond simple pattern matching to include linguistic analysis.

What Full-Text Search Means in PostgreSQL

A technique for searching text data that goes beyond simple pattern matching to include linguistic analysis.

Full-Text Search appears frequently in production operations, architecture decisions, and troubleshooting workflows. Understanding this term helps teams reason about reliability, performance, and safe change management.

Why Full-Text Search Matters

Teams that understand Full-Text Search can make better decisions on database design, incident response, and release safety.

In modern PostgreSQL environments, this concept often connects directly to backup strategy, performance tuning, and operational confidence.

  • Improves decision quality for production operations
  • Reduces avoidable troubleshooting time
  • Strengthens reliability and recovery planning

Practical Example

PostgreSQL's full-text search can find documents containing "running" when searching for "run" using stemming.

Where To Learn More

You can explore deeper implementation patterns in the Vela articles library, review platform workflows in How Vela Works, and compare approaches in our PostgreSQL comparisons.

Related Glossary Topics

Foreign Key ACID Atomicity Archiving (WAL Archiving) archive_command archive_mode BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) B-tree Index

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Full-Text Search in PostgreSQL?
A technique for searching text data that goes beyond simple pattern matching to include linguistic analysis.
Why is Full-Text Search important?
Full-Text Search matters because it directly affects how teams build, operate, and recover PostgreSQL systems in production.
Can you give a practical Full-Text Search example?
PostgreSQL's full-text search can find documents containing "running" when searching for "run" using stemming.
How does Full-Text Search relate to backup, recovery, or performance?
In most production deployments, Full-Text Search influences one or more of these areas: data safety, restore behavior, and performance under load.
What should teams check first when implementing Full-Text Search?
Start with clear operational goals, test in a non-production environment, and validate behavior with repeatable runbooks before relying on it in production.