Question

I want to use SQL Server 2005 Express to find the top five tuples related to a paragraph of text. I know I can use Full Text Indexing and CONTAINSTABLE to find rows that contain an exact phrase, but how do I get it to return the closest matches to the words in a paragraph, not the exact paragraph itself.

So far the only way I can think of is to split the CONTAINSTABLE query, inserting ‘ or ‘ for every space character, generating a query along the lines of the following, but am concerned about performance (and stop words).

SELECT  id, FT.rank, description
FROM    SearchTable
    INNER JOIN CONTAINSTABLE (SearchTable, *, 
            '"This" OR "is" OR "my" OR "paragraph"') AS FT 
            ON SearchTable.id = FT.[key]
ORDER BY Rank DESC

I expect there’s a standard solution to this problem – does anyone know what it is?

Answer 1

Have you tried the FREETEXT and FREETEXTTABLE which should do what you are trying to do?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc879300.aspx