18 Full-Text Search

While there is certainly an artistic element to engineering, nobody cares what color the bridge was that collapsed and killed fifty people.H. W. Kenton

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. Historically, SQL Server’s built-in text searching tools have been 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()), ...

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