Full-Text Search Enhancements

Full-Text Search has been available since SQL Server 7. It is designed to allow fast and flexible indexing and querying of unstructured data in a database. SQL Server 2005 Full-Text Search enhancements are mainly related to performance and integration.

Full-Text Search now supports having multiple instances installed on the server. The engine has been optimized for faster indexing and querying. According to Microsoft, indexing of 20 million rows now takes about 10 hours to populate, whereas it used to take about 14 days. The full-text queries run 30% to 50% faster than in previous releases. New full-text DDL statements simplify configuration and administration. Running Full-Text Search queries over a linked server and searching across multiple selected columns are some of the new querying capabilities. Finally, the biggest improvement is that if you back up, restore, attach, or detach the database, the full-text catalogs can be part of it. There are several other new features, such as thesaurus support, XML data type support, and accent sensitivity/insensitivity.