Full Text Searches

• sbauer

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  March 12, 2004 at 12:02 pm

  #76140

  One of our developers is asking to use Full Text Searches.

  I've done some reading, but was wondering if someone has some past experiences with it. Is there a performance hit?

   

  Thanks in advance for any help.

  Susan

   

• chrisleonard

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  March 12, 2004 at 5:21 pm

  #498649

  Of course there's a performance "hit" because you are storing, processing, and retrieving data.  But when used correctly, FTS can definitely be a net gain in performance.  Your question might be a little vague to respond saying much beyond that.

  Just to give you one anectodal bit of evidence:  where I work we have a 2 GB database used with a 600 MB set of FT catalogs, used to allow people to find articles about certain pharmaceutical drugs.  It works great, and without it, the task would be pretty much a nightmare (performance-wise), since "normal" database indexing in SQL Server can't efficiently find text "in the middle of a field."  More generally, it always works great when it's the right tool for the situation.  So I think the question to ask is really whether full-text indexing is suited to the problems you are trying to solve.

  If you have more specific questions, I think you should post those, and you might get more responses.

  Cheers,

  Chris