First Step to Major Use: Integrated Full-Text Search

Hi,

I've been using Postgres for 3 years now, and as far as I'm
concerned, it blows all other open source (and many commercial) database
systems out of the water. I'm kind of upset at its lack of support by
web hosts, open source projects, and the web developer community-at-large.

I'm putting together an e-Commerce application framework
specifically designed for web programmers and developers (more
flexibility/easier high-end customization at the expense of being useful
to non-professionals) and I designed it originally with Postgres (though
it does have a data abstraction layer). I realized that the full-text
search support for Postgres would be sketchy and most users might opt
for MySQL instead since (A) their host doesn't support Tsearch2 or
OpenFTS (i.e., the user needs special rights to install custom functions
on Pgsql that most hosts won't allow) or (B) they're great developers...
but not great Sysadmins or DbAdmins and messing with the database server
is out-of-their-league.

Now, Tsearch2 (which I use primarily) beats MySQL's native search
out of the water (or at least the last version that I used, which didn't
return any results if the total number of results was below a certain
threshold). It's very powerful, customizeable, and relatively easy to
use - or at least easy enough for any developer familiar with SQL.

I think a major step that the development community behind Pgsql
could take to advance the project would be to take Tsearch2 or OpenFTS
and make one of them (I prefer the Tsearch2 architecture, but then I
haven't used OpenFTS in a while) native to Postgres rather than a contrib.

What do you think?

C. Filipe Medeiros
http://www.nutritionalcenter.com/