Home/ Questions/Q 7412199
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-29T06:30:19+00:00

I have a table with a large(ish) amount of rows 500k, MSSQL Server 2008.

  • 0

I have a table with a large(ish) amount of rows 500k, MSSQL Server 2008. I have a column which holds a nvarchar product ID which is usually 15 characters in length, alphabetical and numerical e.g. FF93F348HJKCF5HW9 . I would like to be able to search for this product ID with the best performance. I have done some research into using Full-Text indexing on this column and I dont really think that using full-text indexing using CONTAINS offers any benefit over using LIKE '%%'. This looks to be down to the fact Full-text indexing is more beneficial when searching for whole words, rather than a series of characters.

Can somebody confirm/deny this for me?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Full-Text indexing is about searching for language words in unstructured text data. Your data doesn’t contain words, just a sequence of characters.

    I haven’t tested this, but I would expect that LIKE would actually be faster, as long as your data is indexed. CONTAINS is meant for searching for words & word-like structures.

    If your requirement is for “auto-complete”, then LIKE will perform pretty well since the optimizer will use an INDEX SEEK when you search for something such as LIKE 'F5521%'.

    This MSDN article explains the basics of the CONTAINS keyword.

    • 0