Been reading thru all the posts and KB's on dealing with searching
across multiple columns.  Most examples indicate you know what you're
looking for in each column.

Here's my big problem:

A: I have 12 tables, each with multiple columns that need to be
searched.

B: User will enter a search condition in any or all the boxes below

  1 - "All these words"
  2 - "Exact phrase"
  3 - "Any of these words"

Unlike the SP3 "fix", if they enter "house cat" in "all these words", I
want a match if "house" and "cat" are in different tables.

In a nutshell, I need to take the 3 inputs, and search across all the
tables, and get ranked results.

The only answer I see, which seems to be kludge, is to create another
table with one column that concats all the indexable columns for all
the tables.

Doing a monster union with multiple contains/free/??? on each select
seems really ugly and would kill performance.

Am I missing the boat, or does anyone have a better solution?

All comments are REALLY appreciated, as I just pulled out the last hair
on my head!

Thanks.