Friday, May 25, 2012

Count regexp matches on a table: Sorting result sets by relevance in PostgreSQL

The idea of counting the number of matches in a field that a regexp has, is a very intesting method to sort sets, for example, a web search result set, when you need the most relevant sources first (for example, containing the searched word more times).

I researched a bit and unfortunatelly, MySQL is far behind PostgreSQL, despite the fact that Oracle bought it (yes, at first I though it could improve a lot with Oracle's experience, but reality is that Oracle is not going to put another free competitor against its own), so I will write this howto for PostgreSQL with an example.

PostgreSQL has a very clever function regexp_matches that will show all substrings which matches a pattern and we will use that to count matches and sort result.

For example, suppose we have this table in database:
DATABASE TABLE AND DATA
TABLE NAME: CONTENT
idINTEGER
htmltextTEXT
TABLE DATA
idhtml
1key
2key key key
3key key
4not matching pattern
If we try to search by keyword key, we could want to appear in relevance order:

Expected resultActual result
id21
id32
id13
To achieve this sorting, we need to use regexp_matches correctly along with our result set, like this way:
SQL Example Sorting Sentence
SELECT id, COUNT(*) AS patternmatch
   FROM (
      SELECT id,regexp_matches(htmltext, 'key', 'g')
         FROM CONTENT
   )
   AS alias
   GROUP BY id ORDER BY patternmatch DESC;

That will result in a set like Expected result in previous table.

But, that was only an example!! How about a real usage?

With a little modification of previous sentence, it could be applied to sort a real search query, just substitute bold text with your pattern and your subquery/data set.

The only requeriment to do that is: Your subquery must have id and htmltext between its results! (and of course, replace 'key' with

So assuming we have a function called our_expensive_lookup (with the lookup parameter) that do a very expensive lookup by some keyword, we could apply this sorting to our returned results by:
SQL Real Usage Sorting Sentence
SELECT id, COUNT(*) AS patternmatch
   FROM (
      SELECT id,regexp_matches(htmltext, 'key', 'g')
         FROM (
            SELECT id, htmltext
               FROM our_expensive_lookup('key')
         ) AS lookup
   ) AS alias
   GROUP BY id ORDER BY patternmatch DESC;
Of course, it can be combined with prepared statements, stored procedures, and so on! The hardest part is done, so just use your imagination!

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