Here’s an interesting tidbit for you. We are currently trying to do some work via the search web service in SharePoint Portal Server 2003. (You may have seen my test app that I wrote for checking out searches and results via that web service.)

Seems there’s an internal debate at Microsoft over which team should be handling our support call - the SQL Server team or the SharePoint team. See, we’re having trouble getting metadata returned correctly when executing full text searches. At first we thought it was an iFilter problem or maybe something weird with our setup…

Turns out SQL Server handles full text queries differently based on the platform it’s installed on - Windows 2000 server vs. Windows 2003 server. I didn’t get any details on exactly what the differences are (I’m only peripheral on the case; another developer here is actually talking directly to the support folks), but that’s the situation.

One would think that it shouldn’t matter what platform the product is installed on, it should consistently handle queries the same. Maybe different optimization or something, but the actual syntax possibly being different? It boggles the mind.