Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations gkittelson on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

How to start over with Full-Text Search

Status
Not open for further replies.

dean12

MIS
Oct 23, 2001
273
US
I'm running SQL2000 on a Win Server 2003 box. Full-text search was implemented about two years ago but now appears that the catalog populate has not been successful since 12/2006. When I try to take a look at the catalog, Enterprise Manager and/or Query hangs. I believe the catalog is damaged.

Can I just start over? Remember that I can't get Enterprise Manager to let me delete the existing catalog - trying to view hangs. So if I could start over, what do I need to do? Is deleting the FDATA directory satisfactory or are there tables or registry entries I need to be concerned with?

thanks.
 
Have you tried to repopulate the catalog? ARe there any errors in the log file? Why has the job been failing?

- Paul
- If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.
 
Almost 100% of the time I cannot get any response to my attempts to do anything. Right now I can go into Enterprise Manager, choose the database, and click on full-Text catalogs. The right pane shows a catalog with a name, location, status is "Idle", and Last Population Date is blank. I right click and look at Properties and it shows a name, location, physical catalog, item count of 0, size of 0, key count of 0. On the tables tab there is nothing listed.

Another database on the same SQL server has full-text search enabled. It has a name, location, catalog, statu of "Building Index" (which has been that was for lord knows how long). Item count is 99,415, size 105MB, keycount 1,489,779, last population date 12/6/2006 1:40:38AM. If I click on the Tables tab I get a number of entries listed (basically what I would expect to see).

But it still appears to be going nowhere.
 
Is the Full Text services still running?

- Paul
- If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.
 
Can you create new catalogs and populate them?

- Paul
- If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.
 
I'm really not sure. I didn't set this up and I have to confess that I'm now very conversent in Full-Text Search. Though I will say that there seems to be some mystery surrounding it.

The actual situation is that we have a 3rd party applicaiton which handles the manipulation of the catalog for us. In the situation of the first database I described above where there are no tables in the catalog, when I try to use the 3rd party application to manipulate the catalog I get the following error:

Could not format the full-text catalog.
Full-text catalog "Pivotal_Full_Text_Catalog" has been lost. Use sp_fulltext_catalog to rebuild and to repopulate the catalog.

Don't ask if I ran "sp_fulltext_catalog" because I have not - I'm not up to speed on full-text search.
 
Well, I believe the whole thing was damaged to the point that SQL wouldn't operate properly with it. So.........

I enabled the option that let's me mess with system tables.

I stopped the full text service.

I wiped sysFullTextCatalogs & sysFullTextNotify

I wiped the FTDATA directories that were being used by full text search.

Restarted the service.

Setup the catalog again and off we go.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top