03 March 2015

Fix: Property PopulationStatus is not available for FullTextCatalog

After restoring a database with full text search active, on Sql Server 2014, on a staging server I got the following error when opening the Full Text Catalog:

Property PopulationStatus is not available for FullTextCatalog '[SearchDB]'. This property may not exist for this object, or may not be retrievable due to insufficient access rights. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)

The error is not self explanatory, but after some investigation I descovered that Full Text Search Service isn't installed on the staging server.

The easy way to validate if  Full Text Search is installed on a Sql Server is to execute the following T-SQL statement on Management studio:

SELECT FULLTEXTSERVICEPROPERTY ('IsFulltextInstalled')