Sql-server – SQL Server 2005: Full-text search space requirements

disk-spacefull-text-searchsql serversql-server-2005

Is there a way to calculate the physical drive space required for a full-text search catalog? Space is cheap, but I'd like to know what I'm getting into.

I'm looking at a table of about 200 articles ranging in length. I'd like to index the title field, and the body of the article.

UPDATE: I'm somewhat looking to predict the future. For example, 200 articles, the title is varchar(500) and the article body is varchar(max). So, without creating the index, can an estimate be done on how large the full-text search catalog may be?

Best Answer

Here is some old code I wrote for SQL 2000. It still works on SQL 2005. You can use this to come up with a rough estimate of how much space you are using per document, then multiply that by your estimated number of documents.

   select 'CatalogName'   = left([name],30),
          'Status'        = case(FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY ([name],'populatestatus'))
                              when 0 then 'Idle'
                              when 1 then 'Full population in progress'
                              when 2 then 'Paused'
                              when 3 then 'Throttled'
                              when 4 then 'Recovering'
                              when 5 then 'Shutdown'
                              when 6 then 'Incremental population in progress'
                              when 7 then 'Building index'
                              when 8 then 'Disk is full.  Paused.'
                              when 9 then 'Change tracking'
                              else 'Unknown'       
                            end,
          'ItemCount'     = FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY (name,'itemcount'),
          'IndexSize(MB)' = FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY (name,'indexsize'),
          'UniqueWords'   = FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY (name,'uniquekeycount'),
          'ErrorLogBytes' = FULLTEXTCATALOGPROPERTY (name,'logsize'),
          'Location'      = left(s.path,50) 
   from sysfulltextcatalogs s
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