Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Day 3: Full Text and Multidimensions

We’ll spend Day 3 investigating the many tools at our disposal to build a movie query system. We’ll begin with the many ways PostgreSQL can search actor/movie names using fuzzy string matching. Then we’ll discover the cube package by creating a movie suggestion system based on similar genres of movies we already like. Because these are all contributed packages, the implementations are special to PostgreSQL and not part of the SQL standard.

Often, when designing a relational database schema, you’ll start with an entity diagram. We’ll be writing a personal movie suggestion system that keeps track of movies, their genres, and their actors, as modeled in the figure.

Before we begin the Day 3 exercises, we’ll ...