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Troubleshooting Errors in a Full-Text Population (Crawl)

When an error occurs during a crawl, the Full-Text Search crawl logging facility creates and maintains a crawl log, which is a plain text file. Each crawl log corresponds to a particular full-text catalog. By default crawl logs for a given instance, in this case, the first instance, are located in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\LOG folder. The crawl log file follows the following naming scheme:

SQLFT<DatabaseID><FullTextCatalogID>.LOG[<n>]

  • <DatabaseID>
    The ID of a database. <dbid> is a five digit number with leading zeros.

  • <FullTextCatalogID>
    Full-text catalog ID. <catid> is a five digit number with leading zeros.

  • <n>
    Is an integer that indicates one or more crawl logs of the same full-text catalog exist.

For example, SQLFT0000500008.2 is the crawl log file for a database with database ID = 5, and full-text catalog ID = 8. The 2 at the end of the file name indicates that there are two crawl log files for this database/catalog pair.