>Much larger than 30 characters, and yes. Truthfully the only times I've ever been involved in text searches is when paragraphs of text (resume text, contract and terms and condition text, etc.) were stored.
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>Still kind of curious about the actual values in that VehicleModel column. Since it's 30 characters - are you only storing entity values (actual model names) , or are you also storing miscellaneous text you want to search on? Is it a case where a single row could have multiple vehicle models?

This wasn't done the proper way at first, with no validation, so we have everything in the vehicle model, as far as values in the records.

>I actually work on a database where we have vehicle platforms, program codes, name plates, mnemonic codes, etc. It's for a provider that works with many auto companies. We have a couple of 1-many tables. Unless you have miscellaneous text within those 30 characters, above and beyond standard vehicle models, I'm trying to understand why text searches would be needed.

The full text index was added because a simple LIKE, with a syntax such as %Honda% was not good enough. A LIKE, as the table grows, will never be as fast as a full text index. So, we create the index and it did the job. However, in that isolated case, it does not perform very well.