Postgresql: Dynamic Regex Pattern - sql

Question

I have event data that looks like this:
id | instance_id | value
1 | 1 | a
2 | 1 | ap
3 | 1 | app
4 | 1 | appl
5 | 2 | b
6 | 2 | bo
7 | 1 | apple
8 | 2 | boa
9 | 2 | boat
10 | 2 | boa
11 | 1 | appl
12 | 1 | apply
Basically, each row is a user typing a new letter. They can also delete letters.
I'd like to create a dataset that looks like this, let's call it data
id | instance_id | value
7 | 1 | apple
9 | 2 | boat
12 | 1 | apply
My goal is to extract all the complete words in each instance, accounting for deletion as well - so it's not sufficient to just get the longest word or the most recently typed.
To do so, I was planning to do a regex operation like so:
select * from data
where not exists (select * from data d2 where d2.value ~ (d.value || '.'))
Effectively I'm trying to build a dynamic regex that adds matches one character more than is present, and is specific to the row it's matching against.
The code above doesn't seem to work. In Python, I can "compile" a regex pattern before I use it. What is the equivalent in PostgreSQL to dynamically build a pattern?

Answer 1

Try simple LIKE operator instead of regex patterns:
SELECT * FROM data d1
WHERE NOT EXISTS (
SELECT * FROM data d2
WHERE d2.value LIKE d1.value ||'_%'
)
Demo: https://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=postgres_9.6&fiddle=cd064c92565639576ff456dbe0cd5f39
Create an index on value column, this should speed up the query a bit.

Answer 2

To find peaks in the sequential data window functions is a good choice. You just need to compare each value with previous and next ones using lag() and lead() functions:
with cte as (
select
*,
length(value) > coalesce(length(lead(value) over (partition by instance_id order by id)),0) and
length(value) > coalesce(length(lag(value) over (partition by instance_id order by id)),length(value)) as is_peak
from data)
select * from cte where is_peak order by id;
Demo