BK-Tree Implementation on top of GiST

* Volkan YAZICI:

[1] Some approaches to best-match file searching
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362003.362025

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/1593.html suggests that this uninteresting
(too much of the database is examined) once you go past an edit distance
of 1. I don't know if this is a problem in your case (it is in mine).

It's a pity that this whole set of problems is still mostly unsolved.

Have you seen contrib/pg_trgm module ?

Oleg
On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Volkan YAZICI wrote:

Hi,

In an address search framework of a company, we need to deal with
queries including potential spelling errors. After some external
address space constraints (e.g. match first letters, word length,
etc.) we're still ending up with a huge data set to filter through
Levenshtein like distance metrics.

Sequential scanning a record set with roughly 100,000 entries through
some sort of distance metric is not something we'd want in
production. For this purpose, I plan to implement BK-Trees[1] on top
of GiST, which will (technically) reduce overhead complexity from O(n)
to O(logn). As far as I'm concerned, such a work will worth the time
it will take when compared to overhead reduction it will bring.

[1] Some approaches to best-match file searching
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=362003.362025

Anyway, I have some experience with source code of intarray
module. Does anybody have suggestions/warnings/comments about such a
project? Would PostgreSQL team welcome such a patch to get integrated
into fuzzystrmatch module, or should I create my own project at
pgfoundry?

BTW, as you'd imagine, related implementation won't be something
specific to Levenshtein. Any distance metric on any kind of data will
be able to benefit from BK-Trees.

Regards.

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Regards,
Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83

Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/1593.html suggests that this uninteresting
(too much of the database is examined) once you go past an edit distance
of 1. I don't know if this is a problem in your case (it is in mine).

Did you see the test results in bk-tree[1]http://www.cliki.net/bk-tree project? Results will
change with respect to metric distance distribution of your input
data, but I was quite impressed by the numbers when I first saw them.

[1]: http://www.cliki.net/bk-tree

Regards.