ILIKE query with indexing for jsonb array data in postgres - postgresql

I have table in which has city as jsonb column which has json array like below
[{"name":"manchester",..},{"name":"liverpool",....}]
now I want to query table on "name" column with ILIKE query.
I have tried with below but it is not working for me
select * from data where city->>'name' ILIKE '%man%'
while i know, I can search with exact match by below query
select * from data where city->>'name' #> 'manchester'
Also I know we can jsonb functions to make it flat data and search but it will not use than indexing.
is there anyway to search data with ilike in a way it also use indexing?

Index support will be difficult; for that, a schema that adheres to the first normal form would be beneficial.
Other than that, you can use the JSONPATH language from v12 on:
WITH t(c) AS (
SELECT '[{"name":"manchester"},{"name":"liverpool"}]'::jsonb
)
SELECT jsonb_path_exists(
c,
'$.**.name ? (# like_regex "man" flag "i")'::jsonpath
)
FROM t;
jsonb_path_exists
═══════════════════
t
(1 row)

You should really store your data differently.
You can do the ilike query "naturally" but without index support, like this:
select * from data where exists (select 1 from jsonb_array_elements(city) f(x) where x->>'name' ILIKE '%man%');
You can get index support like this:
create index on data using gin ((city::text) gin_trgm_ops);
select * from data where city::text ilike '%man%';
But it will find matches within the text of the keys, as well as the values, and using irrelevant keys/values of any are present. You could get around this by creating a function that returns just the values, all banged together into one string, and then use a functional index. But the index will get less effective as the length of the string gets longer, as there will be more false positives that need to be tracked down and weeded out.
create or replace function concat_val(jsonb, text) returns text immutable language sql as $$
select string_agg(x->>$2,' ') from jsonb_array_elements($1) f(x)
$$ parallel safe;
create index on data using gin (concat_val(city,'name') gin_trgm_ops);
select * from data where concat_val(city,'name') ilike '%man%';
You should really store your data differently.

Related

PostgreSQL index for comparison of JSONB values

We're experimenting with JSONB on PostgreSQL 12/13 to see whether it's better alternative for customizable extension attributes than a bunch of extension tables (EAV, I guess) and so far I'm impressed by the results, although using GIN indexes is more tricky than it seems at first.
Experimental table is simple enough:
create TABLE jtest (
id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
text text,
ext jsonb
);
CREATE INDEX jtest_ext_gin_idx ON jtest USING gin (ext);
I'm inserting some various data with (a bigger version of) this monstrous block (quoted only for db-fiddle):
DO 'BEGIN
FOR r IN 1..100000 LOOP
IF r % 10 <= 3 THEN
-- some entries have no extension
INSERT INTO jtest (text, ext) VALUES (''json-'' || LPAD(r::text, 10, ''0''), NULL);
ELSEIF r % 10 = 7 THEN
-- let''s add some numbers and wannabe "dates"
INSERT INTO jtest (text, ext)
VALUES (''json-'' || LPAD(r::text, 10, ''0''), (''{'' ||
''"hired": "'' || current_date - width_bucket(random(), 0, 1, 1000) || ''",'' ||
''"rating": '' || width_bucket(random(), 0, 1, 10) || ''}'')::jsonb);
ELSE
INSERT INTO jtest (text, ext)
VALUES (''json-'' || LPAD(r::text, 10, ''0''), (''{"email": "user'' || r || ''#mycompany.com", "other-key-'' || r || ''": "other-value-'' || r || ''"}'')::jsonb);
END IF;
END LOOP;
END';
Various exact value match operations are easy an GIN works very well for these. But we also need < and LIKE, but let's just focus on comparison for now.
The example query is:
select * from jtest
where ext->>'hired' >= '2020-06-01' -- not using function index on its own
But if I add semantically useless AND the index kicks in:
select * from jtest
where ext->>'hired' >= '2020-06-01'
and ext?'hired';
Here is a fiddle example.
Question #1: I have no problem to implement a query interpreter in our application to make it work, but is it expected behavior? Can't PG figure out that when >= is used the left side is indeed not null?
I also experimented with functional index on (ext->>'hired') - fiddle here:
CREATE INDEX jtest_ext_hired1_idx ON jtest ((ext->>'hired'));
CREATE INDEX jtest_ext_hired2_idx ON jtest ((ext->>'hired')) WHERE ext ? 'hired';
The second index is MUCH smaller than the first and I'm not sure what the first one is good.
Question #2: When I execute the query with ext->>'hired' >= '2020-06-01' it uses the first one in the fiddle - but not in my tests with 15M of rows (only 18k of them returned). So that's the first confusion - my internal tests I don't want to recreate on fiddle (it would execute for far too long) should be more specific - yet use sequential scan for whatever reason. Why does it use sequential scan on much bigger table?
Answer #2: After running ANALYZE it did and it became fast. As this is not the most important question I answer it directly here.
Finally, not a question, with additional AND ext ? 'hired' it uses jtest_ext_hired2_idx index just fine (both in the fiddle and in my much bigger table).
Question #3: Rather generic, is this even the right approach? If I expect using comparison and LIKE operations on values from JSONB, can I just cover it with additional functional indexes? It's still seems more flexible for our case than adding custom columns or joining extension tables, but can't it bite us in the future?
As documented in the manual GIN index only supports the operators: ?, ?&, ?|, #>, #?, ##. So by adding the (seemingly useless) ext?'hired' condition you enable the optimizer to use the GIN index (not the functional index).
To index the hire date, I would create a function that extracts the value as a proper date. You can't do that with a cast in the index expression as the cast is not immutable. But as we know that a cast from a yyyy-mm-dd is indeed immutable, there is nothing wrong with creating a function that is marked immutable.
create function hire_date(p_input jsonb)
returns date
as
$$
select (p_input ->> 'hired')::date;
$$
language sql
strict
immutable;
Then you can use:
CREATE INDEX jtest_ext_hired1_idx ON jtest ( (hire_date(ext)) );
And that index is used directly when the function is used in the where clause:
select *
from jtest
where hire_date(ext) >= '2020-06-01';
Of course that will fail if key 'hire_date' doesn't actually contain a proper DATE value (but it will fail during insert already as the index can't be updated).
Indexing LIKE expressions is in general tricky, but if you only have left anchored search strings (like 'foo%') a regular b-tree index can be used:
create index jtest_email on jtest ( (ext ->> 'email') varchar_pattern_ops);
To index a LIKE expression with a right anchored search string ( like '%foo%') you would need a trigram index.

What PostgreSQL type is good for stroring array of strings and offering fast lookup afterwards

I am using PostgreSQL 11.9
I have a table containing a jsonb column with arbitrary number of key-values. There is a requirement when we perform a search to include all values from this column as well. Searching in jsonb is quite slow so my plan is to create a trigger which will extract all the values from the jsonb column:
select t.* from app.t1, jsonb_each(column_jsonb) as t(k,v)
with something like this. And then insert the values in a newly created column in the same table so I can use this column for faster searches.
My question is what type would be most suitable for storing the keys and then searchin within them. Currently the search looks like this:
CASE
WHEN something IS NOT NULL
THEN EXISTS(SELECT value FROM jsonb_each(column_jsonb) WHERE value::text ILIKE search_term)
END
where the search_term is what the user entered from the front end.
This is not going to be pretty, and normalizing the data model would be better.
You can define a function
CREATE FUNCTION jsonb_values_to_string(
j jsonb,
separator text DEFAULT ','
) RETURNS text LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE STRICT
AS 'SELECT string_agg(value->>0, $2) FROM jsonb_each($1)';
Then you can query like
WHERE jsonb_values_to_string(column_jsonb, '|') ILIKE 'search_term'
and you can define a trigram index on the left hand side expression to speed it up.
Make sure that you choose a separator that does not occur in the data or the pattern...

Indexing on jsonb keys in postgresql

I'm using PostgreSQL.
Is there any way to create index just on dictionary keys, not values.
For example imagine a jsonb column like:
select data from tablename where id = 0;
answer: {1:'v1', 2:'v2'}
I want to index on the key set (or key list) which is [1, 2]. To speed up queries like:
select count(*) from tablename where data ? '2';
As you can see in docs, there is a way for indexing the column entirely (keys + values):
CREATE INDEX idxgin ON api USING GIN (jdoc);
This is not good for me, considering that I store a large amount of data in values.
I tried this before:
CREATE INDEX test ON tablename (jsonb_object_keys(data));
The error was:
ERROR: set-returning functions are not allowed in index expressions
Also, I don't want to store keys in the dictionary as a value.
Can you help me?
Your example doesn't make much sense, as your WHERE clause isn't specifying a JSON operation, and your example output is not valid JSON syntax.
You can hide the set-returning function (and the aggregate) into an IMMUTABLE function:
create function object_keys(jsonb) returns text[] language SQL immutable as $$
select array_agg(jsonb_object_keys) from jsonb_object_keys($1)
$$;
create index on tablename using gin ( object_keys(data));
If you did it this way, you could then query it formulated like this:
select * from tablename where object_keys(data) #> ARRAY['2'];
You could instead make the function return a JSONB containing an array rather than returning a PostgreSQL text array, if you would rather query it that way:
select * from tablename where object_keys_jsonb(data) #> '"2"';
You can't use a ? formulation, because in JSONB that is specifically for objects not arrays. If you really wanted to use ?, you could instead write a function which keeps the object as an object, but converts all the values to JSON null or to empty string, so they take up less space.

Postgresql: query on jsonb column - index doesn't make it quicker

There is a table in Postgresql 9.6, query on jsonb column is slow compared to a relational table, and adding a GIN index on it doesn't make it quicker.
Table:
-- create table
create table dummy_jsonb (
id serial8,
data jsonb,
primary key (id)
);
-- create index
CREATE INDEX dummy_jsonb_data_index ON dummy_jsonb USING gin (data);
-- CREATE INDEX dummy_jsonb_data_index ON dummy_jsonb USING gin (data jsonb_path_ops);
Generate data:
-- generate data,
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION dummy_jsonb_gen_data(n integer) RETURNS integer AS $$
DECLARE
i integer:=1;
name varchar;
create_at varchar;
json_str varchar;
BEGIN
WHILE i<=n LOOP
name:='dummy_' || i::text;
create_at:=EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM date_trunc('milliseconds', now())) * 1000;
json_str:='{
"name": "' || name || '",
"size": ' || i || ',
"create_at": ' || create_at || '
}';
insert into dummy_jsonb(data) values
(json_str::jsonb
);
i:= i + 1;
END LOOP;
return n;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
-- call function,
select dummy_jsonb_gen_data(1000000);
-- drop function,
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS dummy_jsonb_gen_data(integer);
Query:
select * from dummy_jsonb
where data->>'name' like 'dummy_%' and data->>'size' >= '500000'
order by data->>'size' desc
offset 50000 limit 10;
Test result:
The query takes 1.8 seconds on a slow vm.
Adding or removing the index, don't make a difference.
Changing to index gin with jsonb_path_ops, also don't make a difference.
Questions:
Is it possible to make the query quicker, either improve index or sql?
If not, the does it means, within pg a relational table is more proper in this case?
And, in my test, mongodb performs better, does that means mongodb is more proper for such storage & query?
Quote from the manual
The default GIN operator class for jsonb supports queries with top-level key-exists operators ?, ?& and ?| operators and path/value-exists operator #> [...] The non-default GIN operator class jsonb_path_ops supports indexing the #> operator only.
Your query uses LIKE and string comparison with > (which is probably not correct to begin with), neither of those are supported by a GIN index.
But even an index on (data ->> 'name') wouldn't be used for the condition data->>'name' like 'dummy_%' as that is true for all rows because every name starts with dummy.
You can create a regular btree index on the name:
CREATE INDEX ON dummy_jsonb ( (data ->> 'name') varchar_pattern_ops);
Which will be used if the condition is restrictive enough, e.g.:
where data->>'name' like 'dummy_9549%'
If you need to query for the size, you can create an index on ((data ->> 'size')::int) and then use something like this:
where (data->>'size')::int >= 500000
However your use of limit and offset will always force the database to read all rows, sort them and the limit the result. This is never going to be very fast. You might want to read this article for more information why limit/offset is not very efficient.
JSON is a nice addition to the relational world, but only if you use it appropriately. If you don't need dynamic attributes for a row, then use standard columns and data types. Even though JSON support is Postgres is extremely good, this doesn't mean one should use it for everything, just because it's the current hype. Postgres is still a relational database and should be used as such.
Unrelated, but: your function to generate the test data can be simplified to a single SQL statement. You might not have been aware of the generate_series() function for things like that:
insert into dummy_jsonb(data)
select jsonb_build_object('name', 'dummy_'||i,
'size', i::text,
'created_at', (EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM date_trunc('milliseconds', clock_timestamp())) * 1000)::text)
from generate_series(1,1000000) as t(i);
While a btree index (the standard PostgreSQL index based on binary trees) is able to optimize ordering-based queries like >= '500000', the gin index, using an inverted index structure, is meant to quickly find data containing specific elements (it is quite used e.g. for text search to find rows containing given words), so (AFAIK) it can't be used for the query you provide.
PostgreSQL docs on jsonb indexing indicates on which WHERE conditions the index may be applied. As pointed out there, you can create a btree index on specific elements in a jsonb column: indexes on the specific elements referenced in the WHERE clause should work for the query you indicate.
Also, as commented above, think whether you actually need JSON for your use case.

Similar UTF-8 strings for autocomplete field

Background
Users can type in a name and the system should match the text, even if the either the user input or the database field contains accented (UTF-8) characters. This is using the pg_trgm module.
Problem
The code resembles the following:
SELECT
t.label
FROM
the_table t
WHERE
label % 'fil'
ORDER BY
similarity( t.label, 'fil' ) DESC
When the user types fil, the query matches filbert but not filé powder. (Because of the accented character?)
Failed Solution #1
I tried to implement an unaccent function and rewrite the query as:
SELECT
t.label
FROM
the_table t
WHERE
unaccent( label ) % unaccent( 'fil' )
ORDER BY
similarity( unaccent( t.label ), unaccent( 'fil' ) ) DESC
This returns only filbert.
Failed Solution #2
As suggested:
CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;
CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION unaccent_text(text)
RETURNS text AS
$BODY$
SELECT unaccent($1);
$BODY$
LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE
COST 1;
All other indexes on the table have been dropped. Then:
CREATE INDEX label_unaccent_idx
ON the_table( lower( unaccent_text( label ) ) );
This returns only one result:
SELECT
t.label
FROM
the_table t
WHERE
label % 'fil'
ORDER BY
similarity( t.label, 'fil' ) DESC
Question
What is the best way to rewrite the query to ensure that both results are returned?
Thank you!
Related
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_9.0#Unaccent_filtering_dictionary
http://postgresql.1045698.n5.nabble.com/index-refuses-to-build-td5108810.html
You are not using the operator class provided by the pg_trgm module. Create an index like this:
CREATE INDEX label_Lower_unaccent_trgm_idx
ON test_trgm USING gist (lower(unaccent_text(label)) gist_trgm_ops);
Originally, I had a GIN index here, but a GiST is typically better suited for this kind of query because it can return values sorted by similarity. See:
Matching patterns between multiple columns
Finding similar strings with PostgreSQL quickly
Your query has to match the index expression to be able to use it.
SELECT label
FROM the_table
WHERE lower(unaccent_text(label)) % 'fil'
ORDER BY similarity(label, 'fil') DESC; -- ok to use original string here
However, "filbert" and "filé powder" are not actually very similar to "fil" according to the % operator. I suspect you really want:
SELECT label
FROM the_table
WHERE lower(unaccent_text(label)) LIKE 'fil%' -- !
ORDER BY similarity(label, 'fil') DESC; -- ok to use original string here
This finds all strings starting with the search string, and sorts the best matches according to the % operator first.
The expression can use a GIN or GiST index since PostgreSQL 9.1! The manual:
Beginning in PostgreSQL 9.1, these index types also support index
searches for LIKE and ILIKE, for example
If you actually meant to use the % operator:
Try adapting the threshold for the similarity operator %:
SET pg_trgm.similarity_threshold = 0.1; -- Postgres 9.6 or later
SELECT set_limit(0.1); -- Postgres 9.5 or older
Or even lower? The default is 0.3. Just to see whether the threshold filters additional matches.
A solution for PostgreSQL 9.1:
-- Install the requisite extensions.
CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;
CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;
-- Function fixes STABLE vs. IMMUTABLE problem of the unaccent function.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION unaccent_text(text)
RETURNS text AS
$BODY$
-- unaccent is STABLE, but indexes must use IMMUTABLE functions.
SELECT unaccent($1);
$BODY$
LANGUAGE sql IMMUTABLE
COST 1;
-- Create an unaccented index.
CREATE INDEX the_table_label_unaccent_idx
ON the_table USING gin (lower(unaccent_text(label)) gin_trgm_ops);
-- Define the matching threshold.
SELECT set_limit(0.175);
-- Test the query (matching against the index expression).
SELECT
label
FROM
the_table
WHERE
lower(unaccent_text(label)) % 'fil'
ORDER BY
similarity(label, 'fil') DESC
Returns "filbert", "fish fillet", and "filé powder".
Without calling SELECT set_limit(0.175);, you can use the double tilde (~~) operator:
-- Test the query (matching against the index expression).
SELECT
label
FROM
the_table
WHERE
lower(unaccent_text(label)) ~~ 'fil'
ORDER BY
similarity(label, 'fil') DESC
Also returns "filbert", "fish fillet", and "filé powder".