All 7 Full Text Search questions
More in Full Text Search
How do you create a full text index on a table so you can use full text search functions? What is the difference between the CONTAINS and FREETEXT predicates when performing a full text search? How do you perform a proximity search using full text search, finding rows where two words appear near each other? How often does a full text index need to be updated to reflect changes made to the underlying table's data? How would you configure full text search to handle different languages correctly, including proper word breaking and stemming? How do you rank and sort full text search results by their relevance to the search query?
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SQL Server › Full Text Search

What is full text search in SQL Server, and how is it different from a regular LIKE search?

Beginner

Answer

Full text search is a specialized indexing feature designed for efficiently searching large amounts of text, letting you find whole words or phrases quickly even in very large tables, while a regular LIKE search with wildcards has to scan through the text character by character, becoming very slow on large amounts of data.
SELECT * FROM Articles
WHERE CONTAINS(Content, 'database');
Real-world example A news website uses full text search to let visitors quickly search through thousands of articles for specific keywords, delivering fast results that a slow LIKE based search across the same amount of text could never achieve.

Common follow-ups: Do you need to set up anything special before using full text search?;What is the performance difference between full text search and LIKE on a large table?

Indexes;Data Types & Schema Design
All 7 Full Text Search questions