Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals, The

Overview

The ability to search character and text fields is nothing new in the world of SQL databases. For years, DBMSs have provided facilities for searching character strings and fields for other strings. However, these facilities are usually rudimentary at best. Prior to the advent of full-text search support, SQL Server's built-in text searching tools were more of the garden-variety type—just beyond ANSI-compliance, but nothing to write home about. You could perform equality tests using character strings (as with all data types), and you could search for a pattern within a string (using LIKE and PATINDEX), but you couldn't do anything sophisticated such as search by word proximity or inflectional usage.

The addition of native full-text indexing ...