Question

I’m using CONTAINSTABLE to search two table columns. Once the search contains small words like ‘the’ ‘for’ ‘a’ the search returns no results even when they are actually present in the column.

Quick example. Column being searched contains the text. ‘System needs to be upgraded’

Following SQL returns 0 rows

SELECT     * FROM Incident WHERE (TicketNumber IN (
SELECT TicketNumber FROM         [Action] FT_TBL INNER JOIN
CONTAINSTABLE(Action, Text, '"system" AND "needs" AND "to" AND "upgraded" AND NOT "Search Summary"') KEY_TBL ON FT_TBL.ID = KEY_TBL.[KEY]
UNION
SELECT TicketNumber FROM [Incident] FT_TBL INNER JOIN
CONTAINSTABLE(Incident, Subject, '"system" AND "needs" AND "to" AND "upgraded"') AS KEY_TBL ON FT_TBL.TicketNumber = KEY_TBL.[KEY]))

Once ‘to’ is omitted it works fine:

SELECT     * FROM Incident WHERE (TicketNumber IN (
SELECT TicketNumber FROM         [Action] FT_TBL INNER JOIN
CONTAINSTABLE(Action, Text, '"system" AND "needs" AND "upgraded" AND NOT "Search Summary"') KEY_TBL ON FT_TBL.ID = KEY_TBL.[KEY]
UNION
SELECT TicketNumber FROM [Incident] FT_TBL INNER JOIN
CONTAINSTABLE(Incident, Subject, '"system" AND "needs" AND "upgraded"') AS KEY_TBL ON FT_TBL.TicketNumber = KEY_TBL.[KEY]))

How can CONTAINSTABLE be used with these smaller words, or should they be left out altogether? If those smaller words are actually meaningful in the search, how can they be included in the search?

Answer 1

These are not “small words”, these are common words that are on the stop list. They are ignored.

See Stopwords and Stoplists on BOL.