HelpSpot Gets PostgreSQL Support

Ran across Ian Landsman’s blog which had [http://www.userscape.com/blog/2005/08/26/helpspot-gets-postgresql-support/trackback/ a post] discussing the addition of PostgreSQL support to the HelpSpot program. Big deal you say? We’ll, there are a couple of notable things about the blog post: 1. First is that PostgreSQL support was added as response to customer demand… which is huge because we need more people being vocal about thier desire to run applications on PostgreSQL. 2. More software running PostgreSQL is always a good thing, especially in the Help Desk area, where there aren’t too many offerings. 3. The post contains a number of pieces of technical information about programming changes that he had to make in order to get his app to run on PostgreSQL. For those who have been thinking about resources for [http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2005-08/msg00175.php converting] from my$ql -> PostgreSQL, it is worth a look. 4. The guy behind the blog, Ian, seems like a generally decent guy with a very reasonable approach to software, you don’t see that all the time these days. One thing worth following up on is his discussion of free-text-search in PostgreSQL. I quote: ” Full text search won’t be supported in HelpSpot V1. Unlike the other platforms the fulltext engine is an addon and must be built. As such, it functions very differently than the internal fulltext support of MySQL and SQL Server. ” This is one thing that is often glossed over by PostgreSQL advocates. I’m still waiting for some type of wrapper scripts that make doing complex searches (“and” and “or” with multi-word keywords) easy to integrate into application code, cause it really much more complex right now that it’s competitors. And for those who want to tell me that it is much more powerful than those other systems, well, I get that. But I also haven’t seen the “How to build the most kick arse search engine in the world that you can’t even try to build with those other guys” article. Where is that? (maybe it’s just transactions with fulltextsearching? His post alludes to my$ql not having the ability to both on a single table, which seems hard to believe. I figure m$ can do this though.) ”I gave it a quick go, but could see that it was going to be a challenge so this will have to wait. I also didn’t really like that the open source project that built the engine seems to have had it’s last update in 2003. Perhaps the Postgres people are working on a built in solution????” Which made me wonder just which website he was looking at. It’s worth stating someplace that tsearch2 is certainly under active developement (though I can’t proove it now, as the tsearch2 home page seems to be [http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/postgres/gist/tsearch/V2/ gone], and newer versions are always [http://developer.postgresql.org/cvsweb.cgi/pgsql/contrib/tsearch2/ bundled into] the PostgreSQL core for each new release.