A while ago, a request emerged to implement a global find functionality in one of our products. Briefly, the purpose was to be able to search for multiple (different) entities by a pattern that is looked up and matched against several of their attributes. Not very complicated at first glance, such a feature comes with a lot of concerns and trade-offs that need to be analyzed, in addition to the implementation itself, in order to ensure at least a pleasant user experience.

As the underlying database was PostgreSQL and I was aware of its powerful full-text search (FTS) capability, I considered it a potentially good candidate, so I started researching it, trying things out, aiming to compile the solution around it. Unfortunately for the requirement, but fortunately for me and for the interesting FTS capabilities I became aware of during this study, a few hours later, I understood why it cannot be used for pattern searching.