Fulltext Indexes were a new feature in MySQL 5.0, and they're meant to be a wonderful way of searching through large tables with Text column types (or Varchar, for that matter).

I was curious to see how a Fulltext search differed from a regular pattern match search. So I set up Fulltext Indexes on the line column (i.e. the bit with the text in). The syntax for searching through Fulltext Indexes involves the keywords MATCH and AGAINST. Let's find out how times Abraham is mentioned in the bible, first using the Fulltext Index: