Full text search is a more advanced way to search a database. Full text search quickly finds all instances of a term (word) in a table without having to scan rows and without having to know which column a term is stored in. Full text search works by using text indexes. A text index stores positional information for all terms found in the columns you create the text index on. Using a text index can be faster than using a regular index to find rows containing a given value. See How to manage text indexes.

Full text search capability in SQL Anywhere differs from searching using predicates such as LIKE, REGEXP, and SIMILAR TO, because the matching is term-based, not pattern-based.

String comparisons in full text search use all the normal collation settings for the database. For example, if the database is configured to be case insensitive, then full text searches will be case insensitive. See Understanding collations.

Except where noted, full text search leverages all the international features supported by SQL Anywhere. See International languages and character sets.

To perform a full text search on a database containing Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) data, see the whitepaper "Performing Full Text Searches on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Data in SQL Anywhere 11" at  http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1061814.