Text Search

Beyond exact matching and the LIKE-style contains / startsWith / endsWith filters, ZenStack ships with two text-search features for richer querying over String fields:

• Full-Text Search — language-aware, tokenized search powered by PostgreSQL's full-text search.
• Fuzzy Search — approximate, typo-tolerant matching powered by the pg_trgm trigram-similarity extension.

info

Both features are only supported by PostgreSQL for now.

Which one should I use?

The two features solve different problems. Choosing the right one depends on the kind of text you're searching and what counts as "a match" for your use case.

Full-text search

Full-text search tokenizes text into lexemes, applies language-aware stemming and stop-word removal, and matches against structured queries. Reach for it when:

• You're searching natural-language content — article bodies, descriptions, comments, documentation.
• You want stemming, so that "running" matches "run", "mice" matches "mouse", etc.
• You want results ranked by relevance to a multi-term query.
• The search terms are whole words, correctly spelled.

Full-text search does not tolerate typos — a misspelled term simply won't match.

Fuzzy search

Fuzzy search compares strings by trigram similarity (overlapping three-character sequences), so it matches even when the input and the stored value don't line up exactly. Reach for it when:

• You're searching short, identifier-like fields — names, titles, tags, product labels, cities.
• The input may contain typos — missing, transposed, or extra letters.
• You want approximate substring matching — finding a fragment inside a longer value.
• You're building autocomplete or "did you mean…" experiences.
• You want results ranked by closeness to the input string.

Fuzzy search is purely character-based — it has no notion of language, word meaning, or stemming.

At a glance

	Full-text search	Fuzzy search
Backed by	to_tsvector / to_tsquery	pg_trgm extension
Schema attribute	@fullText	@fuzzy
Filter operator	fts	fuzzy
Relevance sorting key	_ftsRelevance	_fuzzyRelevance
Best for	natural-language text	short, identifier-like fields
Typo tolerance	✗	✓
Language-aware (stemming, stop words)	✓	✗