Full-text searches are supported for
MyISAM
tables only.Full-text searches can be used with most multi-byte character sets. The exception is that for Unicode, the
utf8
character set can be used, but not theucs2
character set. However, althoughFULLTEXT
indexes onucs2
columns cannot be used, you can performIN BOOLEAN MODE
searches on aucs2
column that has no such index.The remarks for
utf8
also apply toutf8mb4
, and the remarks forucs2
also apply toutf16
andutf32
.Ideographic languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not have word delimiters. Therefore, the
FULLTEXT
parser cannot determine where words begin and end in these and other such languages. The implications of this and some workarounds for the problem are described in Section 11.9, “Full-Text Search Functions”.Although the use of multiple character sets within a single table is supported, all columns in a
FULLTEXT
index must use the same character set and collation.The
MATCH()
column list must match exactly the column list in someFULLTEXT
index definition for the table, unless thisMATCH()
isIN BOOLEAN MODE
. Boolean-mode searches can be done on nonindexed columns, although they are likely to be slow.The argument to
AGAINST()
must be a constant string.Index hints are more limited for
FULLTEXT
searches than for non-FULLTEXT
searches. See Section 12.2.9.2, “Index Hint Syntax”.