Question

I can’t seem to get acceptable performance from FullText Catalogs. We have situations where we must run 100k+ queries as quickly as possible. Some of the queries use FREETEXT some don’t. Here’s an example of a query

IF EXISTS(select 1 from user_data d where d.userid=@userid and FREETEXT(*, @activities) SET @match=1

This can take between 3-15 seconds. I need it to be much faster < 1s if possible.

I like the ‘flexibility’ of the fulltext query in that it can search across multiple columns and the syntax is pretty intuitive. I’d rather not use a Like statement because we want to be able to match words like ‘Writer’ and ‘Writing’.

I’ve tried some of the suggestions listed here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142560(SQL.90).aspx

We’ve got as much memory and cpu as we can afford, unfortunately we can’t put the catalogs on their own disk controllers.

I’m stumped and ready to explore other alternatives to FullText Queries. Is there anything else out there that gives that kind of ‘Writer’/’Writing’ similar matches? Perhaps even something that uses the CLR?

Answer 1

Check out these alternatives, although I doubt they’ll improve performance without isolating them onto separate hardware:

Which search technology to use with ASP.NET?

Lucene.Net and SQL Server