"Lg" <postgres(at)lg(dot)ndirect(dot)co(dot)uk> writes:
> This is of great interest to me because this is exactly what I am trying
> to do: use indices to speed up anchored searches.
> What you say mirrors what the faq says. However, I just can't get it to
> work.
Probably you initialized the database in non-C locale. Anchored
searches can only be optimized with index scans in C locale; the
index ordering isn't necessarily right in other locales.
You can check the database locale with contrib/pg_controldata,
or if that's not handy try
od -c $PGDATA/global/pg_control
and look for locale names near the end of the file.
regards, tom lane