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PostgreSQL Trigram Indexes for Search

2 posts · Mar 2016

What this trail covers

GitLab has improved its search performance for PostgreSQL users by implementing trigram indexes. This enhancement allows for faster queries using LIKE conditions, significantly speeding up searches for issues, comments, commits, code, merge requests, and snippets. The implementation involved adapting Rails to support PostgreSQL-specific index types and ensuring compatibility with MySQL.

All GitLab trails
  1. Fast Search Using PostgreSQL Trigram Text IndexesThis post details the implementation of PostgreSQL trigram indexes for improved search performance in GitLab 8.6. It explains how trigram indexes work, the challenges with traditional LIKE conditions and full-text search, and the specific implementation details for GitLab, including adapting Rails to support GIN indexes with the `gin_trgm_ops` operator class and ensuring compatibility with MySQL by ignoring PostgreSQL-specific options. The post quantifies the performance improvement with a 946x speedup on a sample query.