Full-text searches are supported for MyISAM tables only.

Full-text searches can be used with most multi-byte character sets. The exception is that for Unicode, the utf8 character set can be used, but not the ucs2 character set.

Ideographic languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not have word delimiters. Therefore, the FULLTEXT parser cannot determine where words begin and end in these and other such languages. The implications of this and some workarounds for the problem are described in Section 12.7, “Full-Text Search Functions”.

Although the use of multiple character sets within a single table is supported, all columns in a FULLTEXT index must use the same character set and collation.

The MATCH() column list must match exactly the column list in some FULLTEXT index definition for the table, unless this MATCH() is IN BOOLEAN MODE. Boolean-mode searches can be done on non-indexed columns, although they are likely to be slow.

The argument to AGAINST() must be a constant string.