My company (OnSphere) has a Life Science product called PharmaReady and this product is built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and ASP.NET.  Whenever I am in the office (which is not often at all) I usually help the PharmaReady technical or development staff with solving WSS related problems and recently they ran into a problem with WSS search with PDF iFilters installed not working with SQL 2005.

After working with them and doing a little research we were able to narrow down that problem had to do with SQL 2005 not accepting the installation changes from the PDF iFilter software.  I did some searching and discovered a article by Hilary Cotter called SQL Server Full Text Search Language that helped me solve the problem.

In this article it advised how to query the SQL 2005 to show me the fulltext document types that were installed and how to load new resources and verify the signature.  After a little testing I was able load the PDF iFilter.  This was accomplished by loading the resource and stopping the SQL Server service to except the changes.  Below are the steps that I took to verify the PDF iFilter resources were not present, load the new resources and make them available.

If you open up the SQL Server 2005 Management studio and open a new query window and type in the SQL statement select document_type, path from sys.fulltext_document_types and execute it you will get a list of all the resources that are currently being used for FTS.  Now comment out the “select” statement that we just created and type in the next two statements and execute them.

exec sp_fulltext_service ‘load_os_resources’, 1;

exec sp_fulltext_service ‘verify_signature’, 0;

Please remember that this is what worked for my situation and it may not work in every situation.