Pattern matching with LIKE, SIMILAR TO or regular expressions in PostgreSQL

There are two methods not mentioned yet for dealing with such cases:

1. partial (or partitioned - if created for full range manually) index - most useful when only a subset of data is required (for example during some maintenance or temporary for some reporting):

   CREATE INDEX ON spelers WHERE name LIKE 'B%'
   

2. partitioning the table itself (using the first character as partitioning key) - this technique is especially worth considering in PostgreSQL 10+ (less painful partitioning) and 11+ (partition pruning during query execution).

Moreover, if the data in a table is sorted, one can benefit from using BRIN index (over the first character).

For checking of initials, I often use casting to "char" (with the double quotes). It's not portable, but very fast. Internally, it simply detoasts the text and returns the first character, and "char" comparison operations are very fast because the type is 1-byte fixed length:

SELECT s.name 
FROM spelers s 
WHERE s.name::"char" =ANY( ARRAY[ "char" 'B', 'D' ] )
ORDER BY 1

Note that casting to "char" is faster than the ascii() slution by @Sole021, but it is not UTF8 compatible (or any other encoding for that matter), returning simply the first byte, so should only be used in cases where the comparison is against plain old 7-bit ASCII characters.

Very old question, but I found another fast solution to this problem:

SELECT s.name 
FROM spelers s 
WHERE ascii(s.name) in (ascii('B'),ascii('D'))
ORDER BY 1

Since function ascii() looks only at first character of the string.

Probably faster to do a single character comparison:

SUBSTR(s.name,1,1)='B' OR SUBSTR(s.name,1,1)='D'

What I have done in the past, faced with a similar performance issue, is to increment the ASCII character of the last letter, and do a BETWEEN. You then get the best performance, for a subset of the LIKE functionality. Of course, it only works in certain situations, but for ultra-large datasets where you're searching on a name for instance, it makes performance go from abysmal to acceptable.

How about adding a column to the table. Depending on your actual requirements:

person_name_start_with_B_or_D (Boolean)

person_name_start_with_char CHAR(1)

person_name_start_with VARCHAR(30)

PostgreSQL doesn't support computed columns in base tables a la SQL Server but the new column can be maintained via trigger. Obviously, this new column would be indexed.

Alternatively, an index on an expression would give you the same, cheaper. E.g.:

CREATE INDEX spelers_name_initial_idx ON spelers (left(name, 1)); 

Queries that match the expression in their conditions can utilize this index.

This way, the performance hit is taken when the data is created or amended, so may only be appropriate for a low activity environment (i.e. much fewer writes than reads).

Your query is pretty much the optimum. Syntax won't get much shorter, query won't get much faster:

SELECT name
FROM   spelers
WHERE  name LIKE 'B%' OR name LIKE 'D%'
ORDER  BY 1;

If you really want to shorten the syntax, use a regular expression with branches:

...
WHERE  name ~ '^(B|D).*'

Or slightly faster, with a character class:

...
WHERE  name ~ '^[BD].*'

A quick test without index yields faster results than for SIMILAR TO in either case for me.
With an appropriate B-Tree index in place, LIKE wins this race by orders of magnitude.

Read the basics about pattern matching in the manual.

Index for superior performance

If you are concerned with performance, create an index like this for bigger tables to support left-anchored search patterns (matching from the start of the string):

CREATE INDEX spelers_name_special_idx ON spelers (name COLLATE "C");

Requires per-column collation support added with Postgres 9.1.

See:

• Is there a difference between text_pattern_ops and COLLATE "C"?
• B-tree index does not seem to be used?

In DBs running with the "C" locale (not typical), a plain B-tree index does the job.

In older versions (or still today if you insist), you can use the special operator class text_pattern_ops for the same purpose:

CREATE INDEX spelers_name_special_idx ON spelers (name text_pattern_ops);

SIMILAR TO or regular expressions with basic left-anchored expressions can use this index, too. But not with branches (B|D) or character classes [BD] (at least in my tests on PostgreSQL 9.0).

Trigram matches or text search use special GIN or GiST indexes.

Overview of pattern matching operators

• LIKE (~~) is simple and fast but limited in its capabilities.
  ILIKE (~~*) the case insensitive variant.
  pg_trgm extends index support for both.

• ~ (regular expression match) is powerful but more complex and may be slow for anything more than basic expressions.

• SIMILAR TO is just pointless. A peculiar halfbreed of LIKE and regular expressions. I never use it. See below.

• % is the "similarity" operator, provided by the additional module pg_trgm. See below.

• @@ is the text search operator. See below.

pg_trgm - trigram matching

Beginning with PostgreSQL 9.1 you can facilitate the extension pg_trgm to provide index support for any LIKE / ILIKE pattern (and simple regexp patterns with ~) using a GIN or GiST index.

Details, example and links:

• How is LIKE implemented?

pg_trgm also provides these operators:

• % - the "similarity" operator
• <% (commutator: %>) - the "word_similarity" operator in Postgres 9.6 or later
• <<% (commutator: %>>) - the "strict_word_similarity" operator in Postgres 11 or later

Text search

Is a special type of pattern matching with separate infrastructure and index types. It uses dictionaries and stemming and is a great tool to find words in documents, especially for natural languages.

Prefix matching is also supported:

• Get partial match from GIN indexed TSVECTOR column

As well as phrase search since Postgres 9.6:

• How to search hyphenated words in PostgreSQL full text search?

Consider the introduction in the manual and the overview of operators and functions.

Additional tools for fuzzy string matching

The additional module fuzzystrmatch offers some more options, but performance is generally inferior to all of the above.

In particular, various implementations of the levenshtein() function may be instrumental.

Why are regular expressions (~) always faster than SIMILAR TO?

The answer is simple. SIMILAR TO expressions are rewritten into regular expressions internally. So, for every SIMILAR TO expression, there is at least one faster regular expression (that saves the overhead of rewriting the expression). There is no performance gain in using SIMILAR TO ever.

And simple expressions that can be done with LIKE (~~) are faster with LIKE anyway.

SIMILAR TO is only supported in PostgreSQL because it ended up in early drafts of the SQL standard. They still haven't gotten rid of it. But there are plans to remove it and include regexp matches instead - or so I heard.

EXPLAIN ANALYZE reveals it. Just try with any table yourself!

EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT * FROM spelers WHERE name SIMILAR TO 'B%';

Reveals:

...  
Seq Scan on spelers  (cost= ...  
  Filter: (name ~ '^(?:B.*)$'::text)

SIMILAR TO has been rewritten with a regular expression (~).

Ultimate performance for this particular case

But EXPLAIN ANALYZE reveals more. Try, with the afore-mentioned index in place:

EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT * FROM spelers WHERE name ~ '^B.*;

Reveals:

...
 ->  Bitmap Heap Scan on spelers  (cost= ...
       Filter: (name ~ '^B.*'::text)
        ->  Bitmap Index Scan on spelers_name_text_pattern_ops_idx (cost= ...
              Index Cond: ((prod ~>=~ 'B'::text) AND (prod ~<~ 'C'::text))

Internally, with an index that is not locale-aware (text_pattern_ops or using locale C) simple left-anchored expressions are rewritten with these text pattern operators: ~>=~, ~<=~, ~>~, ~<~. This is the case for ~, ~~ or SIMILAR TO alike.

The same is true for indexes on varchar types with varchar_pattern_ops or char with bpchar_pattern_ops.

So, applied to the original question, this is the fastest possible way:

SELECT name
FROM   spelers  
WHERE  name ~>=~ 'B' AND name ~<~ 'C'
    OR name ~>=~ 'D' AND name ~<~ 'E'
ORDER  BY 1;

Of course, if you should happen to search for adjacent initials, you can simplify further:

WHERE  name ~>=~ 'B' AND name ~<~ 'D'   -- strings starting with B or C

The gain over plain use of ~ or ~~ is tiny. If performance isn't your paramount requirement, you should just stick with the standard operators - arriving at what you already have in the question.

You could try

SELECT s.name
FROM   spelers s
WHERE  s.name SIMILAR TO '(B|D)%' 
ORDER  BY s.name

I've no idea whether or not either the above or your original expression are sargable in Postgres though.

If you create the suggested index would also be interested to hear how this compares with the other options.

SELECT name
FROM   spelers
WHERE  name >= 'B' AND name < 'C'
UNION ALL
SELECT name
FROM   spelers
WHERE  name >= 'D' AND name < 'E'
ORDER  BY name