Full-Text Search Programmability Enhancements

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Microsoft SQL Server 2005, introduces a number of programmability enhancements to Full-Text Search described below.

Data Definition Language

With this release of SQL Server, you can create, modify, and implement full-text catalogs and indexes using data definition language (DDL) statements. In earlier versions of SQL Server you had to use stored procedures to accomplish these tasks. For more information, see Full-Text Data Definition Language (DDL).

Linked Server Queries

You can issue full-text queries referencing a remote linked server. Linked servers allow Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to execute commands against OLE DB data sources on different servers. Earlier versions of SQL Server allowed you to create standard queries against linked servers but did not support full-text queries against linked servers. For more information, see Querying Linked Servers.

Search Across Multiple Columns

In SQL Server 2005, you can specify multiple columns for a full-text predicate. Earlier versions of SQL Server limited column references to either one or all the columns in a table. This version of SQL Server removes this limitation by allowing you to specify an arbitrary number of columns in a full-text predicate via a column list. You specify column lists in the column_list argument of the full-text predicate. Columns within a single predicate column list must belong to the same table and the wildcard character, "*", cannot occur in the column list. For more information, see Querying Multiple Columns.

Specification of a Language in a Query

Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2005 introduces a feature that allows you specify the LocaleID (LCID) in full-text queries. Specifying this parameter indicates that the linguistic resources such as word-breaking and stemmers for that particular locale should be used. This will allow multiple languages to be indexed and stored within a single column, while still allowing queries to be processed in a language other than the column default language. In pervious versions of SQL Server, it was only possible to specify the full-text query language on a column level by using full-text stored procedures. For more information, see International Considerations for Full-Text Search.