The prefix project is about matching a literal against prefixes in your table, the typical example being a telecom routing table. Thanks to the excellent work around generic indexes in PostgreSQL with GiST, indexing prefix matches is easy to support in an external module. Which is what the prefix extension is all about.

Maybe you didn’t come across this project before, so here’s the typical query you want to run to benefit from the special indexing, where the @> operator is read contains or is a prefix of:

SELECT * FROM prefixes WHERE prefix @> '0123456789';

Now, a user asked about an 8.1 version of the module, as it’s what some distributions ship (here, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2). It turned out it was easy to support 8.1 when you already support 8.2, so the CVS now hosts 8.1 support code. And here’s what the user asking about the feature has to say:

It’s works like a charm now with 3ms queries over 200,000+ rows. The speed also stays less than 4ms when doing complex queries designed for fallback, priority shuffling, and having multiple carriers.