--- title: "transform noise words Server Configuration Option | Microsoft Docs" ms.custom: "" ms.date: "03/02/2017" ms.prod: "sql-server-2016" ms.reviewer: "" ms.suite: "" ms.technology: - "database-engine" ms.tgt_pltfrm: "" ms.topic: "article" helpviewer_keywords: - "full-text queries [SQL Server], performance" - "transform noise words option" - "noise words [full-text search]" - "full-text search [SQL Server], stopwords" - "stopwords [full-text search]" ms.assetid: 69bd388e-a86c-4de4-b5d5-d093424d9c57 caps.latest.revision: 43 author: "BYHAM" ms.author: "rickbyh" manager: "jhubbard" --- # transform noise words Server Configuration Option [!INCLUDE[tsql-appliesto-ss2008-xxxx-xxxx-xxx_md](../../includes/tsql-appliesto-ss2008-xxxx-xxxx-xxx-md.md)] Use the **transform noise words** server configuration option to suppress an error message if noise words, that is [stopwords](../../relational-databases/search/configure-and-manage-stopwords-and-stoplists-for-full-text-search.md), cause a Boolean operation on a full-text query to return zero rows. This option is useful for full-text queries that use the CONTAINS predicate in which Boolean operations or NEAR operations include noise words. The possible values are described in the following table. |Value|Description| |-----------|-----------------| |0|Noise words (or stopwords) are not transformed. When a full-text query contains noise words, the query returns zero rows, and [!INCLUDE[ssNoVersion](../../includes/ssnoversion-md.md)] raises a warning. This is the default behavior.

Note: The warning is a run-time warning. Therefore, if the full-text clause in the query is not executed, the warning is not raised. For a local query, only one warning is raised, even when there are multiple full-text query clauses. For a remote query, the linked server might not relay the error; therefore, the warning might not be raised.| |1|Noise words (or stopwords) are transformed. They are ignored, and the rest of the query is evaluated.

If noise words are specified in a proximity term, [!INCLUDE[ssNoVersion](../../includes/ssnoversion-md.md)] removes them. For example, the noise word `is` is removed from `CONTAINS(, 'NEAR (hello,is,goodbye)')`, transforming the search query into `CONTAINS(, 'NEAR(hello,goodbye)')`. Notice that `CONTAINS(, 'NEAR(hello,is)')` would be transformed into simply `CONTAINS(, hello)` because there is only one valid search term.| ## Effects of the transform noise words Setting This section illustrates the behavior of queries containing a noise word, "`the`", under the alternate settings of **transform noise words**. The sample full-text query strings are assumed to be run against a table row containing the following data: `[1, "The black cat"]`. > [!NOTE] > All such scenarios can generate a noise word warning. - With transform noise words set to 0: |Query string|Result| |------------------|------------| |"`cat`" AND "`the`"|No results (The behavior is the same for "`the`" AND "`cat`".)| |"`cat`" NEAR "`the`"|No results (The behavior is the same for "`the`" NEAR "`cat`".)| |"`the`" AND NOT "`black`"|No results| |"`black`" AND NOT "`the`"|No results| - With transform noise words set to 1: |Query string|Result| |------------------|------------| |"`cat`" AND "`the`"|Hit for row with ID 1| |"`cat`" NEAR "`the`"|Hit for row with ID 1| |"`the`" AND NOT "`black`"|No results| |"`black`" AND NOT "`the`"|Hit for row with ID 1| ## Example The following example sets **transform noise words** to `1`. ``` sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; RECONFIGURE; GO sp_configure 'transform noise words', 1; RECONFIGURE; GO ``` ## See Also [Server Configuration Options (SQL Server)](../../database-engine/configure-windows/server-configuration-options-sql-server.md) [CONTAINS (Transact-SQL)](../../t-sql/queries/contains-transact-sql.md)