Skip to Content
Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Programming
book

Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Programming

by Rob Vieira, Mahsa Nakhjiri
April 2009
Intermediate to advanced
959 pages
25h 32m
English
Wrox
Content preview from Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Programming

Chapter 18. Looking at Things in Full: Full-Text Search

Full-Text Search is an area of significant architectural change in SQL Server 2008. While the core use and functionality hasn't changed all that much, the full-text features are far more integrated into the core of SQL Server as of this release. If you feel you are already familiar with full-text and are ready to skip this chapter, I would encourage you to at least browse the architectural changes and consider their ramifications on things like backup and recovery as well as expanded query result support.

Using plain old T-SQL (without full-text functionality), our options for querying text information are somewhat limited. Indeed, we have only a couple of options:

  • Use a LIKE clause. This is generally woefully inefficient, and is not able to utilize any kind of index structure unless your search pattern starts with an explicit value. If the search starts with a wildcard (say "%" or "_"), then SQL Server wouldn't know which spot in the index to begin with — any indexes become worthless.

  • Use some other form of pattern matching, such as PATINDEX or CHARINDEX. These are generally even more inefficient, but can allow us to do things that LIKE will not.

With Full-Text Search, however, we gain the ability to index the contents of the text — essentially keeping a word list that lets us know what words we can find and in what rows. In addition, we are not limited to just pattern-matching algorithms. We can search for the inflected forms ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

Robert Vieira
Programming Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008

Programming Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008

Leonard Lobel, Andrew Brust, and Stephen Forte
Mastering SQL Server® 2008

Mastering SQL Server® 2008

Michael Lee, Gentry Bieker

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780470257029Purchase book