Troubleshooting Full-Text Search

The troubleshooting information in this section addresses issues that can cause problems in full-text search.

In This Section

• Troubleshooting Full-Text Indexing Failures
  Discusses possible indexing failures and how to respond to them.

• Troubleshooting: Full-Text Index in Inconsistent State After Transaction Log Restored
  Discusses how to respond when the full-text index is not in a consistent state after a log backup is restored.

• Troubleshooting Errors in a Full-Text Population (Crawl)
  Describes how to find the full-text crawl log for a given full-text catalog. This log is useful for diagnosing errors in a full-text population.

• Troubleshooting: Slow Full-Text Indexing Performance Due to Filtering Process
  Discusses performance degradation of the full-text indexing process, which can occur when a document that uses a multithreaded filter contains an embedded document that uses a single-threaded filter, and presents a workaround.

• Troubleshooting: Performing Investigation and Clean-up Tasks for Full-Text Catalogs
  Presents an example of typical investigation and clean-up tasks that you might need if you experience a problem with a full-text catalog.

Additional Troubleshooting Resources

For information about changes in SQL Server 2008 that might break existing full-text search queries, see Breaking Changes to Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2008 R2.

The following stored procedures, views, and server configuration options are useful for troubleshooting full-text search issues:

• default full-text language Option
  Specifies the default language value for full-text indexed columns. Linguistic analysis is performed on all data that is full-text indexed and is dependent on the language of the data. The default value of this option is the language of the server.

• FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY
  Returns information about full-text catalog properties.

• FULLTEXTSERVICEPROPERTY (Transact-SQL)
  Returns information related to the properties of the Full-Text Engine. These properties can be set and retrieved by using sp_fulltext_service.

• sp_fulltext_keymappings
  Returns the content from the keymap internal table. This table maps the custom full-text key values (row IDs) to the internal DocId of the full-text index, which the full-text index uses to map a given row in the base table.

• sp_fulltext_pendingchanges
  Returns unprocessed changes, such as pending inserts, updates, and deletes, for a specified table that is using change tracking.

• sp_fulltext_service
  Changes the server properties of full-text search for SQL Server.

• sp_help_fulltext_system_components
  Returns information for the registered word-breakers, filter, and protocol handlers. sp_help_fulltext_system_components also returns a list of identifiers of databases and full-text catalogs that have used the specified component.

• sys.dm_fts_fdhosts
  Returns information on the current activity of the filter daemon host or hosts on the server instance.

• sys.dm_fts_index_keywords_by_document
  Returns information about the document-level content of a full-text index for the specified table. A given keyword can appear in several documents.

• sys.dm_fts_index_keywords
  Returns information about the content of a full-text index for the specified table.

• sys.dm_fts_index_population
  Returns information about the full-text index populations currently in progress.

• sys.dm_fts_memory_buffers
  Returns information about memory buffers belonging to a specific memory pool that are used as part of a full-text crawl or a full-text crawl range.

• sys.dm_fts_memory_pools
  Returns information about the shared memory pools available to the Full-Text Gatherer component for a full-text crawl or a full-text crawl range.

• sys.dm_fts_outstanding_batches
  Returns information about each full-text indexing batch.

• sys.dm_fts_parser
  Returns the final tokenization result after applying a given word breaker, thesaurus, and stoplist combination to a query string input. The output is equivalent to the output if the specified given query string were issued to the Full-Text Engine.

• sys.dm_fts_population_ranges
  Returns information about the specific ranges related to a full-text index population currently in progress.

• sys.fulltext_document_types
  Returns a row for each document type that is available for full-text indexing operations. Each row represents the IFilter interface that is registered in the instance of SQL Server.

• sys.fulltext_index_fragments
  Contains a row for each full-text index fragment in every table that contains a full-text index.

• sys.fulltext_indexes
  Contains a row per full-text index of a tabular object.

• sys.fulltext_languages
  Contains one row per language whose word breakers are registered with SQL Server. Each row displays the LCID and name of the language.

For information about the full-text properties and the Transact-SQL functions that can be used to obtain the value of each property, see Full-Text Catalog and Index Properties (Transact-SQL).

Word-Breaking Timeout Errors

A word-breaking timeout error can occur in a variety of situations. For information about these situations and how to respond, see MSSQLSERVER_30053.

See Also

Concepts

Full-Text Search Overview

Performance Tuning and Optimization of Full-Text Indexes

Full-Text Catalog and Index How-to Topics (Full-Text Search)

Other Resources

Server Management How-to Topics (Full-Text Search)

Linguistic Component How-to Topics (Full-Text Search)