Full-Text Search in Django with PostgreSQL

After some experiences in the implementation of full-text search functionality with different system, we have decided to use PostgreSQL to implement full-text search functionality in our next project, a website to search for shows, venues, bands and festivals.

In the past, I have worked in two different projects, a mobile platform to sell and buy used items and a sport videos sharing platform, where I used two of the most currently famous full-text search software (Elasticsearch or Solr) but I had some synchronization and management problems.

After that, in my company, we searched for new Django support of full-text search PostgreSQL implementation and we decided to use it to avoid any problems that I had in the past.

I’m going to start speaking about the full-text search in a general context and I want to show the problems I encountered implementing it in the past.

Afterwards, I’m going to talk about the PostgreSQL functionality to implement the full-text search functionality and also present the django.contrib.potgres.search module, with step-by-step demonstrations of its functions with real world data.

Finally, I’m going to show the way we use and test this functionality in our project and which functionality lacks us to have a complete implementation of full-text search in our project.

At the end, I want to present my conclusions about our solution and I want to explore some new features that will be present in the next versions of Django and PostgreSQL.