About Full-Text Searching

You can optimize keyword searching performance by enabling full-text searching for large primary and auxiliary tables. Full-text searching changes made to your database and in SBM System Administrator apply to the following features:

Basic Search
Advanced Search
Global Search
Keyword searching options in report search specifications
Value Find searching on forms for Single Relational and Multi-Relational fields if the value display format for the relational field table contains a Text field

You can enable full-text searching on a table-by-table basis by creating full-text indexes in your database and then enabling the index in SBM System Administrator. For optimal use, enable full-text searching on heavily used tables that contain large amounts of data.

Note: You must index all Text fields in a table once you enable full-text searching.

Consider the following information before enabling full-text searching:

Index Setup and Maintenance:
- Full-text indexes must be created and maintained using your database before full-text searching can be enabled in SBM.
  Note: For detailed steps for SQL Server and Oracle, search for Full-Text Keyword Searching in the Knowledgebase.
- IMPORTANT: As you add and delete Text fields to primary or auxiliary tables, you must add full-text indexes for the new fields after you deploy your process app. To avoid database exception errors as users search for keywords, you must make this change immediately after you deploy your process app.
- Setup and maintenance steps apply to each environment in your system. In addition, full-text search settings are ignored during promotion. If you choose to enable full-text searching on all environments, you must perform the setup and maintenance steps for each environment.
- Indexes increase the amount of disk space needed on the database server, but performance benefits may outweigh disk space requirements.
- Depending on the amount of data in tables, it may take a significant period of time to create database indexes. For best results, schedule index creation during low usage periods for your SBM system.
- Full-text searching is ignored for auxiliary tables for which caching is enabled.
Searching Behavior:
- Search behavior differs for tables using full-text searching and those using searching built in to SBM. Results are based on the database-defined keyword indexes. Words such as "and," "or," and "the" are ignored.
- Wildcard characters in keyword search criteria are ignored.
- Whole words and words that begin with matches are returned. A "deploy" search would return results with words such as "deployment" and "deploying."
- Because you can enable full-text searching for selected tables, users may experience different searching behavior as they use multiple applications.