Full-text usage?

Is it appropriate to use a full-text index and query to search CustomerName and CustomerDBA type fields? I've been told that this type of searching is meant for searching documents, but it seems that Full-text would be useful for fuzzy searching and noise word removal also. Does it make sense to index a varchar field? Does it add performace to searching over native 'Like' queries?

Thanks.

Full-text searching is great when you have multiple words in a column and you'd like to search on those individual words, or if you need to search on different tenses/forms of a word, eliminate noise words, or thesaurus capabilities. So yes, there are benefits to using it on varchar columns. As of SQL Server 2005 your full-text catalogs/indexes are included in your backups and restores so you don't have to rebuild your full-text indexes if you restore the database.

If you are searching on the full value or first few letters of the varchar, then a 'regular' index on the column would likely provide faster performance .. and in SQL Server 2005 we even improved the string searching for LIKEs that start with a wildcard.

Don