---
title: "Full-text search with SQL"
sidebarTitle: "Full-Text Search"
description: "Running full-text search from SQL, with fuzzy, phrase, boolean and boost queries."
icon: magnifying-glass
keywords: ["fts", "sql", "full text search", "fuzzy", "phrase"]
---

<Badge color="red">Enterprise</Badge>

This page describes a LanceDB Enterprise capability. The embedded form
of LanceDB has no server to provide it -- see
[Architecture](/architecture) for what differs between the two.

Full-text search is available in SQL as the [`fts()`](/sql/functions#fts) table
function, which returns matching rows plus a `_score` column:

```sql
SELECT id, text, _score
FROM fts('my_docs', 'puppy')
ORDER BY _score DESC
LIMIT 5
```

The second argument is a bare query string, or a JSON query object for the
fuzzy, phrase, boolean, boost and multi-match forms.

For a keyword test that needs no score,
[`contains_tokens`](/sql/scalar-functions#contains-tokens) is a predicate usable
directly in `WHERE`, and is accelerated by the full-text index.

The query-builder equivalent is [Full-Text Search](/search/full-text-search).