Re: Google Summer of Code 2008

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Jan Urbaski wrote:

> Oleg Bartunov wrote:
>> Jan,
>>
>> the problem is known and well requested. From your promotion it's not
>> clear what's an idea ?
>>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>>> =?UTF-8?B?SmFuIFVyYmHFhHNraQ==?= <j(dot)urbanski(at)students(dot)mimuw(dot)edu(dot)pl>
>>>> writes:
>>>>> 2. Implement better selectivity estimates for FTS.
>
> OK, after reading through the some of the code the idea is to write a custom
> typanalyze function for tsvector columns. It could look inside the tsvectors,
> compute the most commonly appearing lexemes and store that information in
> pg_statistics. Then there should be a custom selectivity function for @@ and
> friends, that would look at the lexemes in pg_statistics, see if the tsquery
> it got matches some/any of them and return a result based on that.

such function already exists, it's ts_stat(). The problem with ts_stat() is
its performance, since it sequentually scans ALL tsvectors. It's possible to
write special function for tsvector data type, which will be used by
analyze, but I'm not sure sampling is a good approach here.
The way we could improve performance of gathering stats using ts_stat() is
to process only new documents. It may be not as fast as it looks because of
lot of updates, so one need to think more about.

>
> I have a feeling that in many cases identifying the top 50 to 300 lexemes
> would be enough to talk about text search selectivity with a degree of
> confidence. At least we wouldn't give overly low estimates for queries
> looking for very popular words, which I believe is worse than givng an overly
> high estimate for a obscure query (am I wrong here?).

Unfortunately, selectivity estimation for query is much difficult than
just estimate frequency of individual word.

Regards,
Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg(at)sai(dot)msu(dot)su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83