Hi Grant,

Thanks for the reply, I tend to agree with you, the full text solution works but its not perfect.

In regards to requirements, in simple terms they are:

1. Able to store 30 fields of user data aginst each book on the system.

2. Each field needs to be able to store at most 100 characters.

3. Need to be able to search aginst any of the 30 fields with a like or contains style search.

4. Also be able to search aginst book information in the same search.

That is what the client has requested and is in the specification. unfortunatly it is a generic requirement which leads to a design that needs to be generic. The downside of that in my experiance is often a generic solution often ends up being slow, hard for SQL to optermise if all the fields are varchar.

Would a SQL script with some of the table structures help in finding a solution?

I've got the weekend coming up so I might try the XML stuff on my laptop at home and see if i can find a solution.