3 Awesome Things That PostgreSQL Can Do 

Where I use these awesome things 

HStore • It’s a key-value column • It’s queryable • It’s in Rails 4 • You can use it now with activerecord- postgres-hstore 

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/hstore.html 

Trigram Matching • Breaks strings up into 3 character chunks • cat => [‘ c’, ‘ca’, ‘cat’, ‘at ‘] • Used as a human friendly search • Doesn’t rely on breaking out words so .coms in merchant names match • Helps with misspellings: ‘eharmoney’ find eHarmony 

Trigram with ActiveRecord scope :search, ->(query) { where("merchants.name % ? or merchants.description % ?", query, query) } 

tablefunc • normal_rand • Normally distributed random values (Gaussian distribution) • crosstab • Pivot displays • connectby • Displays hierarchical data 

Disclaimer YMMV 

Thanks! Jesse Dearing @jessedearing