Apologies if this has been asked a 1000 times before. I'm interested to know how (or indeed if) people are working around the lack of FTS support in the current Azure environment. I have sprocs that use FREETEXTTABLE and CONTAINSTABLE which is currently a showstopper for me.

Unfortunately full text search is not supported at this time. We may add this feature in a future release. But apparently, a search of "full text" on http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/pages/34685-sql-azure-feature-voting does not reveal any results. You can submit a new feature request on this site, and more people voting for the feature means more likely it will be in the next version.

Yi-Lun

According to the SQL Azure Feature Voting <small>Forum</small> at:

http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34685-sql-azure-feature-voting

you will see that there are 376 votes for FREETEXT - 3rd position in Must-Have's.

Can you please give deadlines as to when this feature will be in SQL Azure?

Over a year later and still nothing.

FREETEXTTABLE not yet supported. We will wait much longer?

See you soon.

Another year passes, and still no FREETEXT in SQL Azure.

Microsoft rang us to ask why we are not using SQL Azure, and we told them that lack of FREE TEXT searching is a showstopper for companies who rely upon this with their on-premise SQL Server installations.

SQL Azure must have the SAME SET OF FEATURES as on-premise SQL Server otherwise it will not gain enough traction in the competitive 'database as a service' market.

 

An update would be appreciated.

Another year has passed and still no FREETEXT in SQL Azure.

SQL Azure must have the SAME SET OF FEATURES as on-premise SQL Server otherwise it will not gain enough traction in the competitive 'database as a service' market. Both Amazon RDS and Oracle are now in this game and both offer FREETEXT searching.

Hi,

I think Free Text searching is supported if you create a Windows Azure Virtual Machine with SQL Server installed on it. That will provide the full SQL Server feature support.

Regards,

Alan

FTS is now in preview in SQL DB V12

It is in preview now.