Full-text search index
A full-text search index is a specialized index structure that organizes textual content to support efficient keyword-based searching across text fields.
Grokking Relational Database Design
A full-text index is a specialized database index that supports efficient searching within larger text values.
- How it is used
- Optimizes keyword searches over larger text values in database applications.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the purpose and SQL workflow, but does not explain the internal search structure or ranking algorithm.
- Examples
- Uses product-name keyword searches, movie-title searches, and exact-match contrasts with review codes and payment-method emails.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via SQL by creating a full-text index and querying indexed text with MATCH and AGAINST.
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MongoDB 8.0 in Action, Third Edition
A text index is an index that supports text-search queries over string fields.
- How it is used
- Supports keyword searches over indexed string fields when applications need relevance-aware retrieval.
- How deep it goes
- Explains creation, query syntax, scoring, language behavior, and limitations without detailing index internals.
- Examples
- Uses movie titles and plots, the terms “Zone drinks,” relevance scores, and exclusion with “-Zone drinks.”
- What you can do after
- Apply it via mongosh by creating a multi-field text index and sorting $text results with textScore.
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Cloud Observability in Action
Full-text indexing is the creation of a searchable index over the textual content of documents or log records.
- How it is used
- Supports broad searches across log text during observability work.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the approach, contrasts it with label indexing, and identifies scalability and cost limits without detailing index internals.
- Examples
- Uses Elasticsearch and OpenSearch as full-text systems and Grafana Loki as a label-indexed contrast.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate full-text and label-based indexing choices against search breadth, scalability, storage cost, and retention needs.
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Related concepts
- Atlas Searchalternative to · Atlas Search is MongoDB Atlas's embedded full-text search capability, built on Apache Lucene and supporting features such as scoring and faceting.
- hybrid searchconfigures · Hybrid search is an information-retrieval technique that combines multiple retrieval methods or relevance signals to find or rank relevant results.
- indexingkind of · Indexing is the organization or use of positions, keys, or lookup structures to identify and retrieve selected data or elements.
- regular expressioncontrasts with · A formal pattern notation that describes sets of strings and enables text to be matched, searched, extracted, or transformed.
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