What are the best practices for speeding up text lookups in Postgresql?

Question

PostgreSQL

Created a very large 50Gb table with a path column (path in the file system) with type text. How to organize search in this column with the maximum speed?
I tried to just throw the index but it doesn't really help. What can be done in principle?

Answer 1

If you do not answer a specific question, but talk about abstract "best practices", then
1. Make sure that the server has enough memory for the index. Otherwise, it is simply useless to create it.
2. The index helps only if you are looking for either an exact match or a partial value from the very beginning. If you need a search by substring, then you need to come up with something else. What exactly - depends on the search queries.