Fulltext search missing words - postgresql

Question

I have a table with the following columns:
ordinance_number (text)
description (text)
keywords (text)
document_vectors (tsvector)
I insert into the column document_vectors by combining the other column data:
let ordinanceVecs = `${data.ordinance_number} ${keywords} ${entry} ${description}`;
I noticed that some words are not in the column document_vectors. For example I inserted the following keywords:
eric-test ordinance trash bin <p>data</p> ordinance out
but in the column I only have the following data inside:
'bin':6 'data':7 'eric':2 'eric-test':1 'ordin':4,8 'test':3 'trash':5
So when I want to search for the word 'Ordinance' :
select *
from ordinances.ordinance
where
(
document_vectors ## to_tsquery('ordinance')
or
document_vectors ## to_tsquery('simple', 'ordinance:*')
)
I get the result back. Partial search up to 'ordinan' works but 'ordinanc' returns 0 results:
select *
from ordinances.ordinance
where
(
document_vectors ## to_tsquery('ordinanc')
or
document_vectors ## to_tsquery('simple', 'ordinanc:*')
)
I'm assuming it because of the way PostgreSQL full-text search and lexemes. But how can I fix it so that any part of a word is searchable and return a result?

Answer 1

If you want to search for substrings, full text search is not the tool for you.
This will work much better using a trigram index:
CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;
CREATE INDEX ON ordinances.ordinance USING gin
(ordinance_number || ' ' || keywords || ' ' || entry || ' ' || description) gin_trgm_ops);
Then you can query:
SELECT * FROM ordinances.ordinance
WHERE (ordinance_number || ' ' || keywords || ' ' || entry || ' ' || description)
LIKE '%ordinanc%';
To search for a string that begins at a word boundary, you can use regular expressions:
WHERE (ordinance_number || ' ' || keywords || ' ' || entry || ' ' || description)
~ '\mordinanc'