Question

I have a table I want to bea ble to do fulltext searches on, but I can’t seem to get any hits on my search terms.

Here’s what my table looks like (I took out a few columns that I am confident are not important):

mysql> SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'transcripts';
+-------------+--------+---------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+
| Name        | Engine | Version | Row_format | Collation         | Checksum | Create_options |
+-------------+--------+---------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+
| transcripts | MyISAM |      10 | Dynamic    | latin1_swedish_ci |     NULL |                |
+-------------+--------+---------+------------+-------------------+----------+----------------+

mysql> DESCRIBE transcripts;
+-------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field       | Type     | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id          | int(11)  | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| content     | text     | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| raw_content | text     | YES  | MUL | NULL    |                |
| tape_id     | int(11)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| state       | int(11)  | YES  |     | 0       |                |
| created_at  | datetime | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| updated_at  | datetime | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+-------------+----------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

mysql> SHOW INDEXES FROM transcripts;
+-------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+
| Table       | Non_unique | Key_name          | Seq_in_index | Column_name | Collation | Cardinality | Sub_part | Packed | Null | Index_type |
+-------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+
| transcripts |          0 | PRIMARY           |            1 | id          | A         |           2 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |
| transcripts |          1 | raw_content_index |            1 | raw_content | NULL      |        NULL |     NULL | NULL   | YES  | FULLTEXT   |
+-------------+------------+-------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+

Proof that there is a row to find:

mysql> SELECT id, raw_content FROM transcripts;
+----+-------------+
| id | raw_content |
+----+-------------+
|  1 | foo         |
+----+-------------+

And here are my flailing attempts to get the search to work:

mysql> SELECT * FROM transcripts WHERE MATCH(raw_content) AGAINST ('foo');
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM transcripts WHERE MATCH(raw_content) AGAINST ('foo' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT id FROM transcripts WHERE MATCH(raw_content) AGAINST ('foo' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE);
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM transcripts WHERE MATCH(raw_content) AGAINST ('+foo*' IN BOOLEAN MODE);
Empty set (0.00 sec)

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

by default fulltext ignores words with 3 or less characters

(now posted as an answer by request 🙂 )