I have a product table where the description column is fulltext indexed.
The problem is, users frequently search a single word, which happens to be in the noiseXXX.txt files.
We'd like to keep the noise word functionality enabled, but is there anyway to turn it off just for this one column?
I think you can do this in 2008 with the SET STOPLIST=OFF, but I can't seem to find similar functionality in SQL Server 2005.
In SQL Server 2005, noise word lists are applied to the entire server. You can disable noise words for the entire server by deleting the appropriate noise word file and then re-building the full text indices. But I do not believe it is possible in SQL Server 2005 to selectively disable noise words for a single table. See for instance here, here and here.
In SQL Server 2008, FTS moves from using noise word files to stop lists. Stop lists are containers that contain collections of stopwords which are not included in full text indices and replace the functionality of noise word files.
In SQL Server 2008 (compatibility level 100 only) you can create multiple stoplists for a given language, and stoplists can be specified for individual tables. That is, one table could use a given stoplist, a second table could use a different stoplist, and a third could use no stoplists at all. Stoplist settings apply to an entire table, so if you have multiple columns indexed in a single table, they all must use the same stoplist.
So to answer your question, I do not believe it is possible in SQL Server 2005 to selectively disable noise words for individual tables while leaving them on for other tables. If this is a deal-breaker for you, this might be a good opportunity to upgrade your server to SQL Server 2008 or 2012.
