This wasn't addressed in the original patch, but it doesn't take very
much additional code to cover the case, so let's get it done.
Since pg_trgm 1.1 hasn't been released yet, I just changed the definition
of what's in it, rather than inventing a 1.2.
This works by extracting trigrams from the given regular expression,
in generally the same spirit as the previously-existing support for
LIKE searches, though of course the details are far more complicated.
Currently, only GIN indexes are supported. We might be able to make
it work with GiST indexes later.
The implementation includes adding API functions to backend/regex/
to provide a view of the search NFA created from a regular expression.
These functions are meant to be generic enough to be supportable in
a standalone version of the regex library, should that ever happen.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane
Cases such as similarity('', '') produced a NaN result due to computing
0/0. Per discussion, make it return zero instead.
This appears to be the basic cause of bug #7867 from Michele Baravalle,
although it remains unclear why her installation doesn't think Cyrillic
letters are letters.
Back-patch to all active branches.
Extraction of trigrams did not process LIKE escape sequences properly,
leading to possible misidentification of trigrams near escapes, resulting
in incorrect index search results.
Fujii Masao
This isn't fully tested as yet, in particular I'm not sure that the
"foo--unpackaged--1.0.sql" scripts are OK. But it's time to get some
buildfarm cycles on it.
sepgsql is not converted to an extension, mainly because it seems to
require a very nonstandard installation process.
Dimitri Fontaine and Tom Lane
Unlike Btree-based LIKE optimization, this works for non-left-anchored
search patterns. The effectiveness of the search depends on how many
trigrams can be extracted from the pattern. (The worst case, with no
trigrams, degrades to a full-table scan, so this isn't a panacea. But
it can be very useful.)
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Jan Urbanski
about best practice for including the module creation scripts: to wit
that you should suppress NOTICE messages. This avoids creating
regression failures by adding or removing comment lines in the module
scripts.
--------------------------------------
The pg_trgm contrib module provides functions and index classes
for determining the similarity of text based on trigram
matching.
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Teodor Sigaev