Question

I have create this little sample Table Person.

The Id is a primary key and is identity = True

Now when I try to create a FullText Catalog, I’m unable to search for the Id.

If I follow this wizard, I’ll end up with a Catalog, where its only possible to search for a persons name. I would really like to know, how I can make it possible to do a fulltext search for both the Id and Name.

edit

SELECT *
FROM [TestDB].[dbo].[Person]
WHERE FREETEXT (*, 'anders' );

SELECT *
FROM [TestDB].[dbo].[Person]
WHERE FREETEXT (*, '1' );

I would like them to return the same result, the first returns id = 1 name = Anders, while the second query don’t return anything.

edit 2

Looks like the problem is in using int, but is it not possible to trick FullText to support it?

edit 3

Created a view where I convert the int to a nvarchar. CONVERT(nvarchar(50), Id) AS PersonId this did make it possible for me to select that column, when creating the Full Text Catalog, but It still won’t let me find it searching for the Id.

Answer 1

From reading your question, I am not sure that you understand the purpose of a full-text index. A full-text index is intended to search TEXT (one or more columns) on a table. And not just as a replacement for:

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE col1 LIKE 'Bob''s Pizzaria%'
OR col2 LIKE 'Bob''s Pizzaria%'
OR col3 LIKE 'Bob''s Pizzaria%'

It also allows you to search for variations of “Bob’s Pizzaria” like “Bobs Pizzeria” (in case someone misspells Pizzeria or forgot to put in the ‘ or over-zealous anti-SQL-injection code stripped the ‘) or “Robert’s Pizza” or “Bob’s Pizzeria” or “Bob’s Pizza”, etc. It also allows you to search “in the middle” of a text column (char, varchar, nchar, nvarchar, etc.) without the dreaded “%Bob%Pizza%” that eliminates any chance of using a traditional index.

Enough with the lecture, however. To answer your specific question, I would create a separate column (not a “computed column”) “IdText varchar(10)” and then an AFTER INSERT trigger something like this:

UPDATE t
SET IdText = CAST(Id AS varchar(10))
FROM table AS t
INNER JOIN inserted i ON i.Id = t.Id

If you don’t know what “inserted” is, see this MSDN article or search Stack Overflow for “trigger inserted”. Then you can include the IdText column in your full-text index.

Again, from your example I am not sure that a full-text index is what you should use here but then again your actual situation might be something different and you just created this example for the question. Also, full-text indexes are relatively “expensive” so make sure you do a cost-benefit analysis. Here is a Stack Overflow question about full-text index usage.