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I'm working on a PostgreSQL database for a blogging platform, and one of the columns in my table, blog_content, can hold text up to 800KB per row. This column stores the main content of blog posts, and I need to enable full-text search functionality on it.

To achieve this, I'm considering creating a GIN index on this column, using PostgreSQL's default tsvector approach. However, I'm concerned about potential performance issues and whether indexing such a large text column is a good practice.

Here are my specific concerns:

  1. Index Size: How much storage overhead will this introduce, given the size of the column and the fact that there are millions of rows in the table?

  2. Performance Impact: Will querying the index still be efficient for full-text search on such large text fields, or will the size of the index itself slow down queries? Alternatives: Are there better approaches for handling full-text search on large text columns like this?

Finally, is it common practice to index such large text columns directly in PostgreSQL, or should I consider restructuring my data or architecture?

Any advice on the pros and cons of indexing such a large text column for full-text search in PostgreSQL would be greatly appreciated!

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  • "up to 800KB" is not very informative. What is the average? The median? The index size is going to be very dependent on your data--the only real answer is to try it and see. Maybe use a random subset if you can't try it on the full set--although due to compression this might give misleading results. Commented Dec 13, 2024 at 22:12

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I don't expect a problem with texts of that size. The GIN index will index the individual words, not the entire text.

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Such an index is not going the break anything just by existing.

All indexes require maintenance time and storage space, this will slow down writes to that table.

If it improves performance then yes it is good practice. With the information given in the question; only you can determine if the index cost is worth it or not.

index size depends on the content and size of that column over the whole table, if it's too big to test on the whole table perhaps create copy with fewer records and do some experiments on that.

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