Text Searching/Processing

T-SQL Tuesday #76: Text Searching/Processing

As a managed services operational DBA, I've only had a couple instances where I was responsible for migrating a SQL Server databases with Full-Text Catalogs.  I've never been in the role of a developer with a good reason for using Full-Text Search.  My involvement with Full-Text has been limited to the research necessary to be successful with these Full-Text migrations. In doing the research, for my first Full-Text migration, I definitely found Word-Breakers, Stemmers, Search Filters and Linguistic Components fascinating.  At the time hadoop and the concept of big data were relatively new ideas that hadn't reached their present day colossal status.  Although there were some good uses for Full-Text Search, I always felt like there was so much more potential for the amazing features like Semantic Search.

Fast forward 10 years or so....

I recently watched, "The SQL Sever Evolution" Microsoft Ignite presentation which had an interesting demo of Azure DataWarehouse and it's hybrid integration with Hadoop.  Microsoft also recently announced, "General availability: Azure SQL Database Full-Text Search", however it looks like there are some substantial limitations currently.  I can't help but wonder if there's a strategy to get Azure full-text indexes both stored on and hitting Hadoop on the back-end.  How would such a solution compare to the many big data search options that are currently available?