Add files to fulltext index without storing them as blob

Question

Is there a way to add files to a sql server index without adding them as blobs to the database? Currently we do extract the text content of all our pdf files usind pdf2text and store them as a blob. This way, sql server can add the texts to his index. But this is a big waste of space. We are using sql server 2005. Can the new filestream type of sql server 2008 handle this?

Answer 1

Yes, according to spec fulltext indexing works on filestream columns. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895334.aspx#FullText : Full-text indexing works with a FILESTREAM column in the same way that it does with a varbinary(max) column. The FILESTREAM table must have a column that contains the file name extension for each FILESTREAM BLOB