best/easiest way to search a table in a database?

im pretty new to SQL and i'm just reading up on full-text searches... i need to do a a full-text search on one table i have in the database.. however I'm reading about full-text indexing/searching and a lot of pages are saying that it uses a lot of resources when searching.. i was wondering how bad is it really? we have about ~100 users who would access the database, probably the peak would be 75 at a time.. would people using a full-text searching slow it down a lot? the servr is a dell poweredge 1750 server, dual 2.8ghz xeon, 1 gig ram.. and also, about the incermental population, if i read right, it populates the catalog each time a item in the table is deleted/inserted/modified.. so would that use a lot of resources as well?

i'm just trying to see if it's worth it to enable full-text indexing for searches on the database if it doesn't slow down the server too much... or are there any better/easier ways to perform searches?

thanksIf the Text is of DataType "Char", then indexing may help u. But Indexing on VarChar Data usually does'nt help.|||The efficiency depends more upon the length and cardinality of the strings than on whether they are stored as CHAR or VARCHAR.|||Full text search is not limited to just CHAR and VARCHAR, and its strength is most appreciated when dealing with TEXT and IMAGE fields.

Check the following and drill down:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/architec/8_ar_cs_5tid.asp|||hi chauzer! we have the same scenario. we develop applications for government use and with the same concern as you do, server response is great. no slow or downtime that we experienced so far. blindman is right 'bout his statement. just want to share the experience...that's all|||thanks for the replies guys, just got it set up and see no slowdown at all and works great, thanks

Best way to store information

Hi,

I am using MSDE in my applications. Sometime the tables are large and it takes a time for reading the data by query.

1. If I split the tables it can help me? or not?
2. May be exist another way to read the data?

My application wrote in C# (dot.Net 1.1) using ADO (SQLClient).

Thank's
Alexei

there are a lot of things u can do to reduce the time taken...eg..tune ur queries, create indexes on tables..etc... but comming to ur specific questions
1. spliting the tables...
as ur using sql server 2000 msde , horizontal partition is not too well supported..and it helps most if u keep the partitions on different drives , having seperate headers.....this article gives some info
http://www.sqlteam.com/Item.ASP?ItemID=684

2. other ways...as i said earlier there r a lot of things u can do...identify the bottelnecks and then work towards improving them...|||

Alexei:

Can you present the queries that are giving you problems? Please include some short example data and a brief listing of the composition of the target table in question. It is easier if we know the target problem.

Dave

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You are seriously going to have to give way more information for anyone to answer this question.

You state you are using MSDE, is this as a server? How many users? If you have > 8 simultaneous queries it will start to punish you and seriously degrate performance.

And what do you mean large? Can you post table creations, some sample data, and most importantly, how many rows you have? It might be indexing, it could be poorly written queries, it could be a server/ram issue, but without the table create scripts, it would all be an uneducated guess...