Cannot drop full-text catalog ‘catalog_name’ because it contains a full-text index

Ekrem Önsoy December 16, 2018 MSSQL

“Cannot drop full-text catalog ‘catalog_name’ because it contains a full-text index.”

You may receive this error when you try to delete a Full-Text Catalog. This is because, as the message says, this catalog is being used by an Index.

Run the following code to determine which table is using the Full-Text Index:

SELECT name, ftcatid FROM sysobjects WHERE ftcatid > 0

1	SELECT name, ftcatid FROM sysobjects WHERE ftcatid > 0

After running this command, tables that use Full-Text will be listed.

Remove the full-text index metadata for the related table with the below script.

EXEC sp_fulltext_table 'table_name', 'drop'

1	EXEC sp_fulltext_table 'table_name', 'drop'

You can now remove the Full-Text Catalog with the following code:

DROP FULLTEXT CATALOG fulltext_catalog_name

1	DROP FULLTEXT CATALOG fulltext_catalog_name

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