Overview

The ability to search character and text fields is nothing new in the world of SQL databases. For years, DBMSs have provided facilities for searching character strings and fields for other strings. However, these facilities are usually rudimentary at best. Prior to the advent of full-text search support, SQL Server's built-in text searching tools were more of the garden-variety type—just beyond ANSI-compliance, but nothing to write home about. You could perform equality tests using character strings (as with all data types), and you could search for a pattern within a string (using LIKE and PATINDEX), but you couldn't do anything sophisticated such as search by word proximity or inflectional usage.

The addition of native full-text indexing support changed this. Traditionally, database architects who wanted advanced text searching had to rely on database gateways, operating system files, and technologies external to SQL Server. That's no longer the case. The Microsoft Search service provides the functionality of a full-blown text search engine such as Microsoft Indexing Service within the SQL Server environment. It's used to build the metadata necessary to support full-text searching and to process full-text search queries. The service itself runs only on the server version of the Windows NT operating system family (Windows NT Server and Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Server and Advanced Server, Windows Server 2003, and so on) and can be accessed by SQL Server clients on Windows 9x, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows XP.