Loading & downloading files to/from a Full-Text-Search database

• sean redmond

  SSCertifiable

  Points: 5829

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  March 27, 2020 at 3:19 pm

  #3738325

  Hello everybody,

  I come across full-text search (FTS) everytime I study for an MCP. It has some very specific uses which seem very useful.

  I have been asked as to whether making the user-created files on a particular server searchable is possible by means of FTS. In theory, yes, it is, from what I read about it. I just have no practical experience of FTS beyond the exercises I followed from the MCP book. I am hoping that someone here has practical experience. My questions are the following:

  1. Assuming that hardware is not a limiting factor, how well does FTS scale? Say, I have a share with 50,000 files (mostly text files, MS-Office files and PDFs) that take up 28GB, would that be handled well by FTS? By well, I mean search results within a matter of seconds, assuming indexes are properly set up.

  2. If that is well within FTSs grasp (and I assume that it is), have any of you good readers any ideas that worked well to load all of the files into the DB? At this point in time, SSIS with recursive looping down tree structures is the way I would go. One of the sysadmins suggested PowerShell and this would surely work too.

  3. Final question: nowhere have I read if it is possible to download the file that is stored as a BLOB in the database. Does anyone know how this would be done and if so, would they point me in the right direction please. It would save needless duplication and also serve as an archive (which wasn't asked for but would be a plus).

  Thanks for your help,

  Sean Redmond

   

• Phil Parkin

  SSC Guru

  Points: 247108

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  March 27, 2020 at 3:31 pm

  #3738326

  Have you also considered FileTables for this?

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