How to Add PostgreSQL Full-text Search to Ruby Apps and Optimize Its Performance

by Pavel AstraukhSeptember 11, 2013

Learn how to enable a full-text search by a title, content, author's name, and comments for a RoR application.

In this post, we describe how to implement a built-in PostgreSQL full-text search and add it to your Ruby on Rails application. We demonstrate how it works on a test application that searches articles by a title, content, the author’s name, and comments.

In addition, we explain how to speed up search by eliminating excessive join queries that greatly slow down the system’s performance. Visit this GitHub page to read the article and view code samples.

include PgSearch

pg_search_scope :search,
                against: [:title, :content],
                associated_against: {
                  author: :name,
                  comments: :content
                },
                using: {
                  tsearch: {
                    dictionary: 'english',
                    any_word: true,
                    prefix: true
                  }
                }

Alex Khizhniak is Director of Technical Content Strategy at Altoros and a cofounder of a local Java User Group. Managing distributed teams since 2004, he has gained experience as a journalist, an editor-in-chief, a technical writer, a technology evangelist, a project manager, and a product owner. Alex is obsessed with AI/ML, data science, data integration, ETL/DWH, data quality, databases (SQL/NoSQL), big data, IoT, and BI. The articles and industry reports he created or helped to publish reached out to 3,000,000+ tech-savvy readers. Some of the pieces were covered on TechRepublic, ebizQ, NetworkWorld, CIO.com, etc. Find him on Twitter at @alxkh.