How to view the index contents of a fulltext index in MySQL?

Question

Is it possible to see the actual content of a FULLTEXT INDEX in MySQL? Or even query the index directly (like SELECT words FROM table.fulltext_index and it would return all indexed words, just to have a example)?

For a regular b-tree index on a scalar field this is not neccessary, because they are just the same values, just ordered to speed up lookups (basically). But in a fulltext index there's happening so much "language magic" that it's very hard to know what actually lands in the index when doing an INSERT to the table.

Answer 1

MyISAM has a way, but you are probably not using that version. It includes a way to get the words.

InnoDB builds an inverted index with the word + row number (probably PRIMARY KEY ) + column (if you are indexing multiple columns together) + byte offset into the column. I suspect that last item is stored as a commalist (or similar). That is, I envision the index being something like this:

CREATE TABLE ft_index_for_table_x (
    word VARCHAR ...,
    pk ...,  -- possibly multiple columns
    col ...,  -- which column the word occurs in
    offsets ...,  -- list of byte offsets
    PRIMARY KEY(word, pk, col)
) ENGINE=InnoDB   -- but not really.

Also, note that there are a bunch of transient files; these seem to collect the index info before finally consolidating into the structure above.

I have not heard of a tool for inspecting the index.

This gets something, but I don't think it is quite the list of words:

strings FTS*.ibd  |
    awk '/^[a-z]+$/'  |
    sort  |
    uniq -c  |
    sort -nr

The last sort gets them with the most frequent first; remove to get them alphabetically.