Question

Is there a way that this full-text searching query could be translated from MySQL into SQL Server?

SELECT *, MATCH(title) AGAINST('My Title' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS score FROM books
WHERE MATCH(title) AGAINST('My Title' IN BOOLEAN MODE) ORDER BY score DESC,
books.title ASC

If it helps, I am specifically using SQL Server 2000. I don’t have the option of using a more recent version. :S

Here is a sample scenario.

---

Create the table:

--
-- Table structure for table `books`
--

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `books` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `title` (`title`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 ;

--
-- Index the title column
--

ALTER TABLE `books` ADD INDEX ( `title` )

--
-- Dumping data for table `books`
--

INSERT INTO `books` (`id`, `title`) VALUES
(1, 'My Title'),
(2, 'My Title'),
(3, 'Not My Title'),
(4, 'Other Title'),
(5, 'Not Related'),
(6, 'Not Related Either');

Execute the query:

SELECT *, MATCH(title) AGAINST('My Title' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AS score FROM books
WHERE MATCH(title) AGAINST('My Title' IN BOOLEAN MODE) ORDER BY score DESC,
books.title ASC

Here is what is returned:

id  title           score
1   My Title        1
2   My Title        1
3   Not My Title    1
4   Other Title     1

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

This definitely sounds like a case for implementing Full-Text Search. It sounds like the algorithm you’re after is much more complex than those offered by CHARINDEX, PATINDEX and LIKE, which are very simple on/off type results (either the string contains the searched expression or it doesn’t).

The official Microsoft documentation for Full-Text Search starts here. This article may also be useful, as well as this MSDN article, "Improve the performance of full-text indexing", and some of these Full-Text Search tips on mssqltips.com.

The Full-Text keywords you’re probably most interested in are CONTAINS and CONTAINSTABLE. This page describes, among other things, how CONTAINSTABLE applies ranking.