Oh my Gosh... It's veryyyyyyyyyyyy important.

Without it my clients can't move !!!

We definitely need the full text search feature as soon as possible. If this item is not prioritized and a release released date is no communicated, it will definitely hurt the move to Azure.
We have more than 60 clients waiting for this. Please respond.

Any progress on this issue? Understand Microsoft would not commit to a date, but can anyone say anything of what we could expect?

Our app relies on SQL full-text and the application features based on it cannot be omitted. The lack of the full-text feature in Azure causes that we cannot use it in production for customers deployments.

Our new app uses full text search quite extensively. Hopefully it will be implemented on azure by feb 2012 otherwise we would need to roll out our own server with SQL server as the db

Agreed...we ended up building our own inverted-index / IDF system on top of SQL Azure. Very fast, nice perf, but definitely code debt we didn't want to own. However, the product needed to ship, and we couldn't wait.
Timeline anybody??

Maybe the product planner could update this to give some idea of when its planned? I really dont want to ship Crystal Reports in an Azure app...would they even work, since they like to write temp files to C:\Windows\Temp?

See duplicate FULL-TEXT SUPPORT which is #1 in the list of requested features.

See FULL-TEXT INDEXING which is top of the list.

Yes, at last someone at Microsoft acknowledges this very important piece of functionality. It is a pity that Guy has no idea when though.

Hurray! At last! ;)

Please use FAST as your model, not SQL full text!

Wow, planned. Awesome. The #1 feature request for a year is planned with no date on it. How exciting.

The original FREE TEXT feature request is now 2nd top of this list.

I keep checking back every few months to find that MS STILL have not implemented this!

I am surprised this feature has not been implemented. Critical for web based applications to deliver fast, efficient searches.

We require this for for moving our systems into SQL azure.

This is proving to be a major stumbling block to moving our systems on to the Azure Platform.

we really need full text indexing

Please prioritise