# Fulltext index?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/fulltext-index/103651>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 8, 2007, 10:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/fulltext-index/103651 "2007-05-08T22:35:50Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![plambert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/9d8465/32.png) [@plambert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/plambert)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2007, 10:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/fulltext-index/103651/1 "2007-05-08T22:35:50Z")

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What’s the best way to create a fulltext index on a table column? I  
was looking at the source of the add\_index method, and it looks like:  
add\_index(table, column, “FULLTEXT”)  
will work (at least for MySQL), but according to the comments in the  
source, that relies on a “legacy support” branch of the code. Is  
there a better way?

Thanks,  
–Paul

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![plambert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/9d8465/32.png) [@plambert](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/plambert)\
**Post date:** [May 9, 2007, 12:30am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/fulltext-index/103651/2 "2007-05-09T00:30:11Z")

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Depending on your needs, you can do full text searching using ferret  
([http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac](http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac)), which is a Ruby port of Lucene  
[1]. This removes the dependency on the MySQL full text indexing  
facility. N.b., MySQL only (AFAIK) supports FULLTEXT on MYISAM  
tables. The same tables that don’t support transactions.

HTH

[1] [http://lucene.apache.org/](http://lucene.apache.org/)