Q & A: How Can I tell if Full-Text Search is Installed?

Q: My company wants to evaluate an application that uses Full-Text Search. We’ve never used this feature before and nothing seems to be listed in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). How can I tell if Full-Text Search is enabled on my SQL Server instance?

A:  You can determine if Full-Text Search is installed by querying the FULLTEXTSERVICEPROPERTY like you can see in the following query.

SELECT FULLTEXTSERVICEPROPERTY('IsFullTextInstalled')

If the query returns 1 then Full-Text Search is enabled. If it returns 0 then Full-Text Search is not enabled and you will need to run SQL Server Installation Center to add the Full-Text Search feature.