InnoDB full-text search (FTS) is finally available in MySQL 5.6.4 release. The feature has been on trial through MySQL’s summer lab release, thus we had several blogs covering the feature. In this blog, we will leave the “how to” part of the feature to those blogs, and focus on some important characteristics of this new feature, so you will have a better understanding when trying on the feature.

The InnoDB Full-text Index as an Inverted Index

When comes to the basic design, InnoDB takes a traditional way to implementation the full-text index, which is a so called “Inverted Index”. It composes of a set of auxiliary “index tables” that stores the “Word” “Doc ID” pair, as well as each word’s position in the original text.

Incoming text strings in the inserting records are extracted out, tokenized and decomposed into individual words, and such words are then inserted into the auxiliary …