microsoftsqlserverfull-textsearch.docVIP

Microsoft SQL Server Full-Text Search James R. Hamilton, Tapas K. Nayak Microsoft Corporation {JamesRH, TapasNay}@ 1. Introduction Over the last decade, the focus of the commercial database management community has been primarily on structured data and the industry as a whole has been fairly effective at addressing the needs of these structured storage applications. However, only a small fraction of the data stored and managed each year is fully structured while the vast preponderance of the data stored is either wholly unstructured or only semi-structured in the form of documents, webs, spreadsheets, email and other weakly structured formats. This work investigates the features and capabilities of the full text search access method in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and the follow-on release of this product and how these search capabilities are integrated into the query language. We’ll first outline the architecture for the full text search support, then describe the full text query features in more detail, and finally show examples of how this support allows single SQL queries over structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. 2. SQL Server Search Architecture The SQL Server full text search support leverages the same underlying full text search access method and infrastructure employed in other Microsoft products, including Exchange, Sharepoint Portal Server and the Indexing Service which supports full text search over filesystem hosted data. This approach has several advantages, the most significant of which are 1) common full text search semantics across all data stored in relational tables, the mail system, web hosted data, and filesystem resident data, and 2) leverage of full text search access method and infrastructure investments across many complementary products. Indexed text in SQL Server can range from a simple character string data to documents of many types, including Word, Powerpoint, PDF, Excel, HTML, and XML. The document filter support