I have a query with about 6-7 joined tables and a FREETEXT() predicate on 6 columns of the base table in the where.

Now, this query worked fine (in under 2 seconds) for the last year and practically remained unchanged (i tried old versions and the problem persists)

So today, all of a sudden, the same query takes around 1-1.5 minutes.

After checking the Execution Plan in SQL Server 2005, rebuilding the FULLTEXT Index of that table, reorganising the FULLTEXT index, creating the index from scratch, restarting the SQL Server Service, restarting the whole server I don't know what else to try.

I temporarily switched the query to use LIKE instead until i figure this out (which takes about 6 seconds now).

When I look at the query in the query performance analyser, when I compare the ´FREETEXT´query with the ´LIKE´ query, the former has 350 times as many reads (4921261 vs. 13943) and 20 times (38937 vs. 1938) the CPU usage of the latter.

So it really is the ´FREETEXT´predicate that causes it to be so slow.

Has anyone got any ideas on what the reason might be? Or further tests I could do?