SQL Server’s full text search is amazing. Well, it amazes me at least – it has so many cool capabilities: looking for prefixes, words near each other, different verb tenses, and even thesaurus searches. However, that’s not how I see most people using it: I’ve seen so many shops using it for matching specific strings, thinking it’s going to be faster than LIKE ‘%mysearch%’. That works at small scale, but as your data grows, you run into a query plan performance problem.
When your query uses CONTAINS, SQL Server has a nasty habit of doing a full text search across