Question

I am using SQLite3 for development and PostgreSQL for deployment. However, I am facing the following problem:

My simple search using SQLite3:

def self.search(search)
    if search
      find(:all, :conditions => ["style LIKE ? OR construction LIKE ?", "%#{search}%", "%#{search}%"])
    else
      find(:all)
    end
end

However, it doesn’t work for PostgreSQL, and I need to replace the LIKE for ILIKE to solve the problem:

def self.search(search)
    if search
      find(:all, :conditions => ["style ILIKE ? OR construction ILIKE ?", "%#{search}%", "%#{search}%"])
    else
      find(:all)
    end
end

Is there a “Ruby way” to do these searches across any database?

EDIT – based on your answers I don’t believe I will find a generic Ruby solution for that.

I have followed the Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example – by Michael Hartl, where the final Gemfile shows both databases… well, disappointing…

Answer 1

The root of the problem lies here:

I am using SQLite3 for development and PostgreSQL for deployment.

That’s a bad idea™. You will keep running into incompatibilities – or worse: not realize some until damage is done.
Use the same RDBMS (PostgreSQL) for development and production and save yourself the pointless trouble.

While you are stuck with your unfortunate setup, there is a simple fix:

lower(style) LIKE lower(?)

Works on both platforms alike.

Drop the right-hand lower() if you provide a lower-case search-pattern.

In standard SQLite lower(X) only folds ASCII letters. Quoting the chapter Core Functions in the SQLite manual:

The lower(X) function returns a copy of string X with all
ASCII characters converted to lower case. The default built-in lower()
function works for ASCII characters only. To do case conversions on
non-ASCII characters, load the ICU extension.

Bold emphasis mine.

PostgreSQL lower(X) works with UTF-8 out of the box.

As a welcome side effect, you can speed up that query in PostgreSQL with an index on the expression lower(style), which will be faster than using ILIKE and a basic index on style.

Also, since PostgreSQL 9.1 you can use a GIN or GIST index with the pg_trgm extension to speed up any LIKE and ILIKE query – trigram indexes are case-insensitive. Details:

• Similar UTF-8 strings for autocomplete field