Does the SQL Server 2008 search problem affect SharePoint search?

Question

Does anyone know if the problems that have been affecting Stack Overflow with regards to SQL Server 2008 Full Text Search performance have implications for the search in SharePoint? As far as I understand it SharePoint search uses SQL Server full text search.

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any problem with SQL Server under 2008, but I'm sure it won't affect SharePoint 2007.
Since 2007, SharePoint search no longer user SQL Search.

If you're running SharePoint 2003, I'm not sure SQL 2008 is supported.

Answer 2

SharePoint 2007 has its own search database, to store items such as search scopes and other things. The actual search index does not use full text search, but stores it's information inside a file based index.

So any search queries run on SharePoint will not cause the issue.

Search crawling of a site is another story, the implementation of which I am not completely sure of. However, most SharePoint sites are not subject to the same transactional throughput that a site such as StackOverflow are hit with. Morevoer, if a SharePoint site was used to host data as transactional as StackOverflow, very serious performance issues would likely result.

So search in SharePoint 2007 is not going to have the same issue as StackOverflow. I would not completely rule out some performance hits while a search crawl is running with a SQL 2008 back end, but with decent scheduling and sub 100gig databases, issue should not be noticed by users.