September 15, 2002 at 6:32 pm
Ok, if I have a field containing "clocktower", and I run a full-text search for "clock" or "tower", it doesn't return anything. Why not? Is there a way to extend a search?
September 15, 2002 at 6:36 pm
Or, even better- "clock*" will find "clocktower", but "*tower" won't!
September 16, 2002 at 1:21 am
quote:
Or, even better- "clock*" will find "clocktower", but "*tower" won't!
The simple answer is that this is the way FTS works. It can do right-truncated search, but not left-truncated.
Chris Hedgate @ Apptus Technologies (http://www.apptus.se)
Edited by - chrhedga on 09/16/2002 01:21:23 AM
September 16, 2002 at 6:27 am
Right, I guess I'm having trouble understanding why. Why can't/doesn't it look inside words? Why is it pushed as being wonderful when it's not even as flexible as the LIKE statement? I suppose if you want to search big documents that are held in a db, but is that it? Does the functionality get better in SQL2k?
September 16, 2002 at 11:31 am
As I work at a company that are specialized at designing search engines (that beat FTS or Oracle Context or other similar applications by a mile) I am the first to agree that FTS is very limited, though it has it's uses sometimes. The reason it doesn't support left-truncated queries as LIKE does is that they result in worthless performance if done the way a LIKE clause would do, and they have not included any other functionality.
The general performance of FTS is much better in SQL2K than in SQL7, also the functionality supported is better (but not left-truncated queries), but as I said, it's not great.
Chris Hedgate @ Apptus Technologies (http://www.apptus.se)
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