What is fts?

FTS, or Full-Text Search, is a technique used in databases to allow efficient searching of textual data. Unlike standard string matching which can be slow, FTS uses an index to rapidly identify documents (rows) containing specific words or phrases.

Here's a breakdown of key aspects:

• Indexing: FTS works by creating an inverted index. This index maps words to the documents in which they appear. This allows the database to quickly locate relevant documents without scanning every row.

• Tokenization: The process of breaking down the text into individual tokens (usually words). This often involves removing punctuation and converting text to lowercase.

• Stemming and Lemmatization: These are techniques to reduce words to their root form (e.g., "running" becomes "run"). Stemming is a simpler, faster process, while Lemmatization considers the context of the word and produces a valid word.

• Stop Words: Common words like "a", "the", "is" are often ignored during indexing and searching to improve performance. These are called stop words.

• Ranking/Relevance: FTS often provides a relevance score indicating how well a document matches the search query. This allows results to be ordered by relevance.

• Querying: FTS typically provides a special syntax for constructing search queries. This may include support for boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), phrase searching, wildcard characters, and proximity searching.

• Applications: FTS is used in a wide variety of applications, including search engines, document management systems, and e-commerce platforms. It's essential for providing fast and accurate search capabilities when dealing with large amounts of textual data.