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Our application connects to a SQL Server database. There is a column that is nvarchar(max) that has been added an must be included in the search. The number of records in the this DB is only in the 10s of thousands and there are only a few hundred people using the application. I’m told to explore Full Text Search, is this necessary?
This is like asking, I work 5 miles away, and I was told to consider buying a car. Is this necessary? Too many variables to give you a simple and correct answer to your question. For example, is it a nice walk? Is there public transit available? Is your schedule flexible? Do you have to go far for lunch or run errands after work?
Full-Text Search can help if your typical searches are going to be
WHERE col LIKE '%foo%'– but whether it is necessary depends on how large this column will get, whether your searches are true wildcard searches, your tolerance for millisecond vs. nanosecond queries, the amount of concurrency, even seemingly extraneous stuff like whether the data is always in memory and can be searched more efficiently.The better answer is that you should try it. Populate a table with a copy of your data, add a full-text index, and see if your typical workload improves by using full-text queries instead of
LIKE. It probably will, but there’s no way for us to know for sure even if you add more specifics than ballpark row counts.