- varchar(250)
- varchar(max)

There are other columns in these tables but the above two are always
there.  What is the best way to look for keywords in all of these
tables but only in the above two columns?   LIKE with wildcards is an
option but I was wondering if there is any benefit to using fulltext
cataloging or some other method.  These columns aren't indexed.  Only
the IDENTITY columns, which are clustered and a primary keys.

Thanks,
John

Full text indexing would give you a lot more capability such as word
stemming, proximity ranking, relevance ranking, etc. In SQL Server 2K it
takes a lot of horsepower to manage, and there are performance issues with
large catalogs. According to MS, full text indexing performance has improved
considerably:

"For example, on the same hardware, with the same data set, building a
full-text index on 20 million rows of character-based text data took roughly
14 days in SQL Server 2000, while in SQL Server 2005, the same index
required less than 10 hours."

I have not run any performance tests on SS 2005, but I think it might be
worth your time to prototype it and see.

-- Bill