Execution of a full-text operation failed. A clause of the query contained only ignored words.

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Eric Sorenson - 22 Sep 2004 23:07 GMT

I am running SQL Server 2000 SP3 on Windows 2003 Server. I have been
receiving full-text failures on queries such as this:
select * from table where contains(column, '"AT&T"').

If I remove the "&" it seems to return only the ATT entries vs. ATT
and AT&T entries. I can take this same query and run it on our old
environment (SQL Server 2000 SP3 and Windows 2000 Server), it returns
all the results with no errors.

Here is the error I receive when running the above query on our Server
2003 box.
Server: Msg 7619, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Execution of a full-text operation failed. A clause of the query
contained only ignored words.

Does anyone know what might be causing this, could it be the Microsoft
Search on Server 2003 vs. Server 2000? Please help.
-Eric

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John Kane - 23 Sep 2004 01:17 GMT

Eric,
Yep, this is one of the FAQ's we get here, although, more and more it's an
issue with Windows 2003 Server (Win2003) vs. Windows 2000 Server (Win2K) or
sometimes visa versa...

Q. Does anyone know what might be causing this, could it be the Microsoft
Search on Server 2003 vs. Server 2000?
A. YES !! You may want to checkout my blog entry on this very subject at
http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/jt_kane/archive/2003/09/19/217.aspx as well as
my many, many posts on Win2K's infosoft.dll vs. Win2003's langwrbk.dll
wordbreaker via a Google groups search:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=langwrbk+infosoft now up to 103 hits, a
very popular subject, IMHO.

If you had your SQL Server 2003 SP3 (exactly the same config) installed on
Win2K, then the below SQL FTS query:

select * from table where contains(column, '"AT&T"')

would return the correct results, as the punctuation (& or ampersand) in
this case would cause the entire string "AT&T" to be treated as a single
token, but then if you had other punctuation in contact with other search
strings, this would cause problems. This specific issue is a well know bug
with infosoft.dll on Win2K and can be worked around using the Neutral
"Language for Word Breaker". However, on Win2003, this has been "fixed" such
that the punctuation is not considered part of the token, and unless you
have removed the single letter "T" from the US_English noise.enu file, as
well as "AT" as noise words and run a Full Population, then on Win2003 this
string is treated as ONLY containing ignored words because of the Win2003
langwrbk.dll change in behavior.

Regards,
John

> I am running SQL Server 2000 SP3 on Windows 2003 Server. I have been
> receiving full-text failures on queries such as this:
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> Search on Server 2003 vs. Server 2000? Please help.
> -Eric

Reply to this Message

Eric Sorenson - 23 Sep 2004 14:47 GMT

Thank you for the information John. We had opened a case with Microsoft
to troubleshoot this issue further and here is what they told us:

Here is a summary of what I have found in my research so far.
1) SQL 2000 on Windows 2003 : Searching for "AT&T" fails
2) SQL 2000 on Windows 2000 : Searching for "AT&T" works
Essentially the finding so far has been that the search service word
breaker has been modified to include '&' as a word breaker in Windows
2003 and Windows XP due to requests from customers. Unfortunately at
this point there does not seem to be any mechanism to modify the
behavior of the word breaker. Technically there might be a way to switch
DLLs and have the Windows 2000 search functionality in Windows 2003.
However, apart from being complicated and untested, this is not a
supported configuration.
I explored the option of trimming the noise file so that when "AT&T " is
broken into "AT" and "T", both would be recognized. However this can
cause other issues because all records with the words "AT" or the
alphabet "T" as a separate word would show up making the search
imprecise. Also this will cause the catalog file to be much larger since
it has to index all occurrences of these words. Hence I would not
recommend this option.
Since the full-test search capability is dependent on Windows Search,
the search string with "&" works on a windows 2000 machine but not on a
windows 2003 machine. I will be getting this case reassigned to a
daytime engineer for further analysis and follow up with you. In the
meantime, please feel free to call back into the queue if you need
immediate assistance

Thanks,
Eric

Reply to this Message

John Kane - 23 Sep 2004 18:04 GMT

You're welcome, Eric,
You might be interested in this reply from another(?) Microsoft SQL Support
person in another forum as he filed a DCR on this subject and it posted to a
SQLCentral forum
(http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=8&messageid=
117679 - see the last entry). I've been in contact with him on this subject
recently and he replied today, saying that there has not been much movement
on Win2K word breaking functionality in Win2003... <sigh>...

You may want to pass on to your Microsoft Support person the following SQL
Server 2000 bug - Shiloh bug# 351310 "Full Text Search Win2K word breaker
does not ignore punctuation unless separated by white space". This is the
bug for SQL 2000 on Win2K and the workaround is to use the Neutral "Language
for Word Breaker". To the best of my knowledge, there is not similar fix or
workaround for Win2003 to revert back to Win2K punctuation behavior and
while swapping dll's *might* work, it certainly would not be supported by
Microsoft!

Let me know how it goes and MS plans to address this issue in future Win2003
hotfixes &/or Service Packs!
Thanks,
John

> Thank you for the information John. We had opened a case with Microsoft
> to troubleshoot this issue further and here is what they told us:
[quoted text clipped - 26 lines]
> Thanks,
> Eric

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