Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed

Full-Text Indexing

xml columns can be full-text indexed, just like relational columns. The big difference is that for xml columns, the word boundary is not whitespace but element delimiters (<, >). Element text is indexed; attribute values are ignored.

It’s important to use exist() when using a full-text T-SQL function such as CONTAINS to reduce unnecessary scans on the XML columns that don’t contain the text you are looking for.

Note

To generate a full-text index, a unique, non-null, single column index is required. The constraint name PK_ _SimpleBook_ _2F2FFC0C shown in the following example represents the automatically generated primary key index name for the primary key of SimpleBook. Your instance of SQL Server will likely generate a different ...