Analyse Text

Hi

This isn’t really a SQL query but it is related to MS SQL Server. We use SQL Server to store the results of surveys some of which have free text questions so produce large text fields as an answer. Does anyone know of a package or tool that can analyse this data from SQL Server? I have looked at SQL Servers Analysis Tool using OLAP but it appears to use closed fields, i.e. the answer can be one of a set as opposed to whatever the user typed in. Am i wrong in this understanding? The sort of analysis we would be looking for is repeated words/phrases etc.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks for help! :)

I believe Fulltext search will help you in that.

Look in BOL for

FREETEXT , Contains, containstable etc.

Mak

Thanks for your prompt reply!

I had considered freetext search but i thought it was just a search facility instead of an analysis facility. I dont want to have to specify which terms to search on but rather to have a system that automatically goes through all the text in all the fields and picks out works and phrases that appear a lot. And then preferably ranks them in some sort of order. There are a lot of this sort of tool available but they all concentrate on a document (eg word) as opposed to a database of fields.

Thanks again

Jack