Full Context Searching

One of the hardest tasks until now has been supporting searches on text fields. As we know, indexes can’t be built on text fields and so searches on these fields are notoriously slow. However, in SQL Server 7, the Full Context Search Engine has been added. The Full Text Indexing Wizard, accessible from Enterprise Manager under the Tools, Wizards, Database menu, walks you through selecting tables and columns that will be supported by the service. Linguistic searches (for example, all forms of driving such as drive, driving, drove) and rankings of the result set are also available. For more information, see the chapter in the Online books under “Creating and Maintaining Databases” titled “Full text indexes.”