I’ve been keeping my eye on this for a while now.  A couple months ago I installed it on my desktop at home to start developing my dad’s new website PBJ Unlimited and also installed a technology preview of the SQL Management Studio Express, which looks to be just as featureful as the non-express version.

A couple days ago I checked to see if they had released a new version of the management studio and was greeted with the download for the Advanced Services  – which includes full text indexing.   All Free.  Free to use, free to redistribute.  Fantastic.

Some of you may be familiar with Chef, the recipe/kitchen application I wrote about a year ago.  Its current database is Postgres, which was chosen for a number of factors: stored procedures; full text indexing; transactions; runs on linux (I didn’t have a windows server at the time); free.  Well, now that I have a nice new Windows server, and SQL Express now supports full-text indexing, I’m porting the database to SQL Server and will rewrite the app from .Net 1.0 to .Net 2.0.

Last night I got the database ported.  It really only took an hour or so, including the 20 minutes to get full text indexing enabled and configured on my tables.