In order to do FULLTEXT searches on 2-letter phrases such as "PR Manager" and "MS Word", I have added *ft_min_word_len=2* to the MySQL config file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf).
Is there anything particularly wrong with doing this? Will it reduce performance? Will it prevent scaling to large datasets?
Any comments would be appreciated.
No, it may only increase your full text dictionary size but won't have a particular impact on search performance.
All two-letter combinations will have to be indexed, which will increase the size of your search indexes and slow down the indexing process. It should have small impact on the speed of searches itself. You may also run into more words becoming stop-words and becoming unsearchable. It's unlikely "PR" and "MS" would become stop-words, but "IT" is very likely, given that FTS is normally case-insensitive.