Cannot use a CONTAINS or FREETEXT predicate on table or indexed view it is not full-text indexed

Question

I need to fetch all records which contain .

At the moment I use this SQL:

  select * from dbo.mytable
    where CONTAINS(Location, '.')

but I receive this error:

Cannot use a CONTAINS or FREETEXT predicate on table or indexed view it is not full-text indexed.

I cannot set column full text indexed as I do not have high privilege.

Any idea how to circumnavigate this problem?

Solution

If you want to use CONTAINS the column needs to be full-text indexed.

If you don't, or can't, then you can search for data containing a . using LIKE

 where Location LIKE '%.%'