Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Internals

Semantic indexes

Semantic Search—a new feature in SQL Server 2012—uses the full-text keywords returned from FDHOST.exe process as input and builds on that index to enable new searching scenarios over unstructured data. Semantic search does searches on the meaning of the document, analogous to the way that full-text search searches on the keywords contained in the document.

Because the indexes for Semantic Search are built using the same input as full-text search, no semantic index–specific DDL or index processing is separate from the full-text search processing. You specify the STATISTICAL_SEMANTICS keyword column by column in the CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX or ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX DDL, as reflected in the sys.fulltext_index_columns metadata view. Here’s ...