I have been looking around for search information regarding BLOBs and (think) I saw that BLOBs have to have FULLTEXT selected when creating the table. I have created test pages that successfully search the items that have FULLTEXT turned on.
Anyway, I have a database already in place that's populated with data. The ability is not there to add FULLTEXT to a number of elements. It seems as though I can only apply it to VARCHAR elements after creating the table. Why is that ability not allowed after creating the table?
Is there some other way to search the BLOBs without FULLTEXT? If not, can I convert the items to LONGTEXT and turn FULLTEXT on (or something along those lines) without losing data? I will, of course, back up the database before trying this, but I need to know what steps need to be taken in order to make these fields searchable.
