[dm-l] Experience with Full Text Searching

Hello all, I have another question for the collective wisdom. What are people's experience with full text searching. We are building an xml-ised database of original journal articles. These will be retrievable using metadata tags like issue, author, key words, subjects, etc. The problem is that building full text retrieval capabilities into the same search engine will ultimately affect display times. I guess I have two questions:

a) is full text searching of academic articles a sine qua non? I used to think everybody did it, but I've been looking a bit more and see it is less usual than I thought in the case of larger libraries. b) have people suggestions for incorporating full text searching into a document database. -dan