tfifield (2/28/2011)

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Thanks everyone for your comments. I should have mentioned in the article about Full Text searches in SQL Server.

As one poster mentioned, it's kind of a pain in the neck to start with. It's a can of worms that doesn't necessarily need to be opened for just one simple application where you know exactly the type of user input you're going to get - i.e. very structured user input. In 12 years of programming SQL Server I have only had 1 client that even had Full Text enabled. This auto parts dealer is really huge and the didn't have it.

It certainly won't handle every kind of search and wouldn't be appropriate for many applications. For one, if the data has a lot of noise punctuation and you don't really know what all is there so you can't predict it.

As I mentioned in the article, this is for item/product type descriptions. This would be in a very controlled environment where most everything is known about the noise words ahead of time.

In any case, I'm grateful for the discussion.

Todd Fifield