Hi All: Last month, I was looking for way to query 3 FT tables
simultaneously.

I found that a UNION with 3 separate queries worked, but someone pointed out
that duplicates would occur (and they did).

It was suggested that I use a query like:

select <columns>
 from table1
         inner join freetexttable(table1,*, @srchstring) ft1
                       on ft1.key = table1.<key column>
         inner join table2
                        on table2.<common key> = table1.<common key>
                        inner join freetexttable(table2,*, @srchstring) ft2
                                      on ft2.key = table2.<key column>

I did get that to work, but the problem is the query won't return any
matches if the searchstring is not found in both FT tables.

Going back to my original goal, I have 3 tables:

products
manufacturers
skus

And these tables are all in the FT cat.

I want to be able to search for a term like "blue" or "5180-1" (a sku) and
return a match from any table in the FT cat.

Is there any way to do it with the nested join query above? Or is there
another way to do it?

Before I started using the freetexttable query, I was using some fugly code
like:

   SELECT <columns> FROM products WHERE <columns> LIKE '%<searchstr>%'
   <if no results then>
   SELECT <columns> FROM manufacturers WHERE <columns> LIKE '%<searchstr>%'

...do I need to do something like that, but instead concatenate the results
from each query into a temp table?

Thanks for any advice!

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