New Document Storage and Indexing Features

SQL 2000 provides several new features for storing long documents such as Word files in the database. Taken together with its Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web access features, these new capabilities make SQL 2000 more attractive for storing Web content or documents. Compared to SQL 7, SQL 2000 offers the following document storage and indexing improvements:

Additional document types can be indexed. SQL 2000 can build full-text indexes of non-text documents (such as Word files and Excel spreadsheets) stored in the database. SQL 7 supports only text files. SQL 2000 also provides a new “filter” API that lets application developers add their own support for new document types.

Full text indexing is performed automatically, without administrator intervention. Full-text indexing (introduced in SQL 7) makes it possible to store long text documents in the database and retrieve them by keyword, either from an external application or by using SQL queries. SQL 2000 automatically updates full-text indexes to reflect the latest content. It updates indexes differentially, changing them to reflect only inserts, deletes, or updates of documents. With SQL 7, in contrast, an administrator must periodically rebuild full-text indexes, and builds are not differential—SQL 7 scans all indexed content during a build. With SQL 2000, administrators can still manually initiate complete builds or differential updates to full-text indexes and can control the frequency of automatic updates.