XML, Spatial, and Full-Text Indexing

Abstract

The last couple chapters focused on indexing what is commonly referred to as structured data, where there is common schema and organization around the data and its storage. In this chapter, the indexing focus shifts to unstructured data. With both structured and unstructured data, the task of indexing is to gain optimal efficiency for retrieving and manipulating data, but the data types that represent these different types of data have differences in how they are stored in the database. These differences dictate how and why indexing is implemented. SQL Server has specialized data types and features that implement indexing for enhancing the efficiency of unstructured data and its features. The data types covered in this chapter include XML and spatial data. The chapter also covers the full-text search feature, and how we implement and consider indexing for this fully-integrated feature of SQL Server.