SQL Server Indexing Book Giveaway – Week 5

by Jason S, posted in SQL Server, SQLServerSyndication

It’s time for week 5 of giving out some copies of Expert Performance Indexing for SQL Server.  So far, I’ve sent out four copies of the book based on comments from those posts.  You can find the previous weeks’ posts to review those topics here: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Expert Performance Indexing for SQL Server is a book I co-wrote with Grant Fritchey (Blog | @gfritchey) last summer, which I think can be a valuable resource to anyone building indexes on SQL Server.  As part of finishing the book, Apress sent me a number of copies of the book to share with people.  I figured the best way to share these out is to give them away to people that comment on this blog.

So here’s a topic for leaving a comment this week…

The Question

For week five, the question will focus on chapters six and seven, which cover full-text indexing and indexes on memory-optimized tables, respectively.  The topic for discussion in the comments this time is…

What challenges have you solve with full-text indexes?  Or what have you learned about indexes on memory optimized tables?

If you have a story to share in this area, leave it in a comment below. After a week, I’ll select one of the comments and send that author a copy of the book.

July 25 Update

A bit late on selecting the winner for this post, but after looking over the comments, the winner for the book this week is Margaret Norkett. She upgraded from SQL Server 2005 to 2012 with the “old style” full-text indexes and ran into issues with the migration creating large numbers of ndf files. Just for the pain of dealing with that many ndf files, she deserves the book.
Learn more about full-text indexes in chapter six of Expert Performance Indexing for SQL Server.

The other comments this week were from:

  • Robert built a resume search capabilities for HR using full-text indexes.
  • Peter used full-text indexing back in the day prior to the recent improvement. While it was combersome at that time and required some workarounds, today he’d jump right in with it.

4 thoughts on “SQL Server Indexing Book Giveaway – Week 5”

  1. Thanks for picking my comment for the book. I’m looking forward to reading it and seeing if our solution was the right one for that particular issue.

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  2. I was a developer once (LOL) and my project was to create a Human Resources resume database. The web application would parse through the text of a Word or PDF document and store that text in a searchable varchar(max) column as well as store the file (I used File Tables). I used a Full-Text Index on that column so the HR person could search by simple opened text: i.e. “Chemical Engineer with 5 years experience”

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  3. Upgrading SQL Server from 2005 to 2008 R2 and then to 2012 where databases had the “old style” full text indexes was interesting. The upgrade process just made the full text indexes into ndf files, increasing the number of files in the database from 2 to 2+however many full text indexes there were on the database (in this instance, 3). That in itself created some issues with backups and restores and log shipping, etc. We ended up resolving the issue by pulling the data from those extra ndfs back into the mdf file and dropping those ndfs. Then we rebuilt the full text indexes which created in the new normal manner inside the database.

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  4. I remember trying to use Full Text Indexing with some system way back in the early days. It worked great for pattern searches, which were a big deal with this product. However, we needed it to be near real time and Full Text didn’t really support that as you had to populate the catalog constantly to get it to work. We ended up replacing that with some crazy workaround to accomplish the purpose instead. Now, we’d probably jump right in. I remember the “Contains” search was really powerful for our purposes at the time.

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