Migrate multilingual full-text search from SQL Server to PostgreSQL

This article explains how to migrate multilingual full-text search from SQL Server to PostgreSQL, addressing differences in text processing, accent handling, and language-specific tokenization.

• SQL Server and PostgreSQL handle collation, stemming, and accent sensitivity differently, requiring careful reimplementation
• PostgreSQL separates collation from full-text search configuration, using text search configurations for tokenization and normalization
• Use unaccent dictionary and custom text search configurations for accent-insensitive full-text search in PostgreSQL
• Language-specific examples provided for English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese using appropriate PostgreSQL configurations
• Implement stopwords and synonyms using SQL tables and functions instead of file-based dictionaries unavailable in Aurora/RDS
• Create GIN indexes on tsvector expressions for efficient full-text search performance
• Test multilingual behavior, accent sensitivity, and query results with representative data before production deployment

Successful migration requires understanding PostgreSQL's separation of collation and full-text search, selecting appropriate text search configurations per language, and validating behavior matches SQL Server expectations.