Handling regular expressions

However, this is still not everything. Trigram indexes are even capable of speeding up simple regular expressions. The following example shows how this can be done:

test=# SELECT * FROM t_location WHERE name ~ '[A-C].*neu.*'; 
name
--------------
Bruckneudorf
(1 row)
test=# explain SELECT * FROM t_location WHERE name ~ '[A-C].*neu.*'; 
QUERY PLAN
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Index Scan using idx_trgm on t_location (cost=0.14..8.16
rows=1 width=13)
Index Cond: (name ~ '[A-C].*neu.*'::text)
(2 rows)

PostgreSQL will inspect the regular expression and use the index to answer the question.

Internally, PostgreSQL can transform the regular expression into a graph and traverse the index accordingly.