views:

174

answers:

4

Besides full-text indexing and using LIKE keyword, what are other tools to build search functionality on top of MS SQL? This question is particularly for searching records, not files.

+2  A: 

2008's full text search capabilities have been improved - perhaps look there first..

jimg
Will check this out along with compatibility with Entity Framework
vintana
+1  A: 

I believe MS SQL 2005+ has the capability to search using regular expression.

MSDN has an article about this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163473.aspx.

Martin
+4  A: 

In episode 11 of the SO podcast Jeff and Joel discussed full text searching of SQL Server, Joel's recommendation was Lucene.NET. You can see their discussion in that episode's transcript, it is about a quarter of the way down the page.

Richard C. McGuire
This is about what I was going to comment; in FogBugz we use Lucene.NET for our full-text searches. Keep in mind that Lucene wants to index your data before you can search it, and this takes a while on very large data sets.
Jacob
All along I thought Lucene.NET is for document indexing.
vintana
+2  A: 

I documented how I used Lucene.NET in my ASP.NET application BugTracker.NET here:

http://www.ifdefined.com/blog/post/2009/02/Full-Text-Search-in-ASPNET-using-LuceneNET.aspx

Corey Trager
This is great. Thanks for sharing this.
vintana