hi,

out website is starting to get serious about switching from SQL 2000 to SQL
2005. in the process we hope to address a few weak points in our site's
fulltext searching.

i'd like to find the best possible documentation or courses to get up to
speed on this. i have googled quite extensively and found some detailed
information, e.g. at msdn, in newsgroups, and the two fulltext articles
here:
  http://www.simple-talk.com/author/hilary-cotter/

(which strike me as very good as far as they go.)

my question is whether there are good books, articles, or courses that go
deeper still. maybe someone has assembled a list that i haven't found yet?

in particular i'm interested in the following issues:
- i've read that SQL 2005 promises improvements in fulltext search, but i
haven't seen anything dramatic in my reading and testing yet [*]; (one
example: supposedly the german noise word list was improved, but my
impression is it's the same as before; this is no big deal, we will replace
it with something like the 100 most frequent German words when we switch to
2005 -- good breaking point)
- i'd like to learn more about language-specific issues such as how words
are parsed and stemming is done, in particular how can i tune and test these

i'd be grateful for any pointers.

cheers,

Tim Hanson

[*] one quote from one of the above-sited articles is intriguing:

  Similarly a table can be full-text indexed in a single
  catalog; or to put it another way - a table's full-text
  index cannot span catalogs. However, in SQL 2005 you
  can full-text index views which may reside in different
  catalogs than the underlying base tables. This provides
  performance benefits and allows partitioning of tables.

however i'd need to learn much more to decide whether i can benefit from it.