Introduction

Linguistic (language-based) searching has long been a staple of web search engines such as Google and high-end document management systems. Many developers have created custom utilities and third-party applications that implement complex search functionality similar to that provided by the most popular search engines. What many people don’t realize immedi-ately is that SQL Server provides this advanced linguistic search capability out-of-the-box. Full-Text Search (FTS) has been included with SQL Server since the SQL Server 7 release. FTS allows you to perform linguistic searches of documents and text content stored in SQL Server data-bases using standard T-SQL queries. FTS is a powerful tool that can be used to implement enterprise-class linguistic database searches.

SQL Server 2008 increases the power of FTS by adding a variety of new features that make it easier than ever to administer, troubleshoot, and generally use SQL Server’s built-in linguistic search functionality in your own applications. In this book, we’ll provide an in-depth tour of SQL Server 2008’s FTS features and functionality, from both the server and client perspective.