Question

I’m using a CONTAINSTABLE query with MS SQL Server’s full-text indexing engine to search within a textual column; e.g.:

SELECT * 
FROM MyTable
INNER MERGE JOIN CONTAINSTABLE(MyTable, sDescription, 'FORMSOF(INFLECTIONAL, "brains")')
    AS TBL1 ON TBL1.[key]=MyTable.ixKey

This does a great job of finding rows with a description including a word like “brains” (e.g. “brain”, “brained”). However, when I display these results to the user, I’d like to highlight the word that matched their query (just like Google). But I can’t just look for the search term in the results: if the result contains “brain”, I obviously can’t highlight “brains”.

Can SQL Server tell me where in the column (either the word or character) the full-text match occurs? Alternatively, can I manually run the stemmer to get all the forms of the search term? I could highlight each of those individually, then.

Answer 1

SQL Server 2008 includes a function to get the inflected forms of a word or phrase, using the full-text engine’s parser: sys.dm_fts_parser.

SELECT display_term, source_term, occurrence FROM sys.dm_fts_parser('FORMSOF(INFLECTIONAL, "brains")', 1033, 0, 0)

gets a table like:

display_term | source_term | occurrence
---------------------------------------
brain        | brains      | 1
brains       | brains      | 1
brained      | brained     | 1

(Working with query phrases is a bit more work, as it inflects each word separately, but it’s not too hard to put things back together.)

Now I can just highlight any occurrence of any of the inflected forms. It’s a bit more work than if SQL Server just told me where the FTS matches are, but it’ll do.