>While doing a lot of things with SQL Server this week, by curiosity, I was wondering what would be necessary to enable full text retrieval on memo fields? Or, is it that we don't have anything to do as this is by default. That would then mean that whenever we will issue a SQLExec() to search for a specific word in a memo field that it will already be optimized? Basically, if I'm able to achieve the same in Visual FoxPro, by the use of PHDBase, to obtain in seconds a full result of records matching a specific criteria, will SQL Server able to support the same without having to install any additional component?

SQL Server 2000 has a special component for that called 'Full-Text Search'. See Building Search Applications for the Web Using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Full-Text Search http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql2k/html/sql_fulltextsearch.asp for more info.