Do you have a target date on when the Full Text search feature will be operational?
SQL Server 7.0 (which we use) has a really cool feature built in that would take care of this for us and we need only enable it (I don't know if this has been done -- Been a while since I've asked) and do minor modifications to the search function. There are downsides I know of for certain, though, including doubling of the size of the database and a major slowdown if we do something like add and populate a field when the message table has millions of rows. A slowdown that apparently would last *days* rather than minutes.
I know how to write such a solution myself that would do away with the reindexing slowdown and likely be much smaller and faster. I figured if we implement the built-in thing immediately (after determining if we can later disable it and cut the database size in half by doing so), it'll at least work for us long enough to let me write a replacement if we determine we'll need to do so.
I'm not sure why it hasn't been done yet, but the only programmer with access to the actual hardware (in case we need to reinsert the SQL CD) and the only programmer currently making programming changes are both busy with other things.
So, the best answer I can give is that we will likely have text searching working again about a day after the feature included with SQL Server is installed and I have access to make programming changes. I'm hoping that'll work out to no later than the weekend of the 26th.
If anyone out there is intimately familiar with SQL Server's Full-text Search feature as it applies to extremely large tables, and doesn't mind giving some free help, please PM me.
