Question

My project is based on Questions and Answers (stackoverflow style).

I need to allow users to search for previously asked questions.

The Questions table would be like this:

Questions
-------------------------------------------------
id                 questions
-------------------------------------------------
1                  How to cook pasta?
2                  How to Drive a car?
3                  When did Napoleon die?

Now when I’m going to write something to search for, I would write something like this:

When did Brazil win the world cup?

Let’s say I’m gonna split this String on spaces, into an array of Strings.

What is the best SELECT SQL query to fetch all questions containing those Strings, ignoring upper case and lower case for each word, and sorting the results by the less mentioned word, why?

Because there will be so many questions which will contain When,and,will,how,etc.. , but not so many questions which will have Brazil, so Brazil would be like the Key Word.

I’m using SQL Server 2008.

Answer 1

You really don’t want to be doing this in raw SQL.

I suggest you look into the full-text search options for your database, this might be a good place to start.