Trouble shoot fulltext

Sharepoint have had some problems with fulltext and to fix those problems we did discover some items that cold be nice to know:

- There is a limitation of 255 catalogs in the same instance of SQL server. Since each database can have multiple catalogs it is relatively easy to hit this limitations. This limitation is removed in Sql 2005!

- If the service account of sql server is changed via "services" instead of via SQL EM there will be problems. The same goes for if you remove the build in administrators group. The work around here is to add the system account and grant it rights:

EXEC sp_grantlogin [NT Authority\System]
EXEC sp_addsrvrolemember @loginame = [NT Authority\System]
, @rolename = 'sysadmin'

Note, the search service in the OS needs to run under the system account and not a service account. The fulltext service needs to be restarted after this work.

If there still is problems in the catalog we can run a EXEC sp_fulltext_service 'clean_up' to remove corupted entries from the catalogue.

On systems under heavy stress there might also be problems with timeouts. There are two timeouts that can be changed:

EXEC sp_fulltext_service 'data_timeout',120
EXEC sp_fulltext_service 'connect_timeout',120

Note, those are per server and are valid for all catalogs in the server.

The data_timeout is for handling documents. It might well be that it takes longer time than the timeout value is set to. In that case we can add more time to it. In Sql 2005 this is by default set to wait unlimited time. The same goes for connect_timeout.

- For some of the catalogs they had been moved from other servers. When that is true it looks like the catalog is working but in fact it is not. The only solution here is to either copy catalogs and registry entries to the new server or to make it easier, script out the catalog, drop it and then recreate it from script. This will create all needed info in the registry and the files.