I am new to full text indexing of documents but I know enough to get the files into the database and apply indexing and searches because I got it to work for Word (.doc) files.
I'm trying to get Adobe's Ifilter version 11 to work in Windows 7 x64. I'm using Sql Server 2012 Express with Advanced Services sp1. I have included the full path to the /bin folder for the PDF dll in my PATH environment variable per the instructions.
Register ifilters (after install)
EXEC sys.sp_fulltext_service 'load_os_resources', 1;
Verify that the .pdf filter is installed:
EXEC sys.sp_help_fulltext_system_components 'filter';
This is the row I get for PDF which I delimited with ';'. The underline portion is what I have in PATH env variable.
filter; .pdf; E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603; C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe PDF iFilter 11 for 64-bit platforms\bin\PDFFilter.dll; 11.0.1.36; Adobe Systems, Inc.
The file content column is
content VARBINARY(MAX) NOT NULL
I insert the file with
INSERT INTO dbo.Documents (filename, doctype, content)
SELECT
N'MyFile',
N'pdf',
bulkcolumn
FROM OPENROWSET(BULK 'C:\MyFile.pdf', SINGLE_BLOB) AS doc;
I reboot the machine and rebuild the Full Text Catalog after installing the PDF iFilter.
Then I search with one of these. There are Word and PDF files that contain 'apple'.
SELECT id, filename, doctype FROM dbo.Documents WHERE FREETEXT(content, N'apple');
SELECT id, filename, doctype FROM dbo.Documents WHERE CONTAINS(content, N'apple');
Now this all works well for .doc files but .PDF files never show up in searches. I have tried both version 9 and version 11 to no avail.