Thanks for the replies.
David, I would have normalized it to 2 or more tables, but the number of bar-delimited are not fixed and as new data are added the maximum number of these values may change. Also, the problem with like I think is that matching is not strict and thus might give spurious hits.
Arjen's solution(haven't tried yet) looks better to me.
-Neel
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Arjen Nienhuis
<a.g.nienhuis@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all,
I am trying to do a SELECT operation with a WHERE condition. However, the column with which I am trying to do the comparison has several values which are pipe-delimited. I want to return a match(true) if the WHERE condition matches any of the bar-delimited values.
For example, SELECT id WHERE synonyms = 'word';
Here synonyms is a pipe-delimited field and I want to match "word" with any of the values of the synonyms fields.
SELECT id FROM t WHERE 'word' = ANY(regexp_split_to_array(synonyms, '[|]'));
With postgres it's possible to make an index on regexp_split_to_array(synonyms, '[|]')) for some extra speed. But its better to store the synonyms as an array in the first place.
Thanks in advance.
Neel