to hack the sparql2sql thing for quicker fulltext search, the right class to understand what happens is: com.hp.hpl.jena.query.sql.engine.RDBQueryEngine; there, set a breakpoint into getPlanForQueryPattern/QueryIterator exec() of, fine idea: SELECT CONVERT(j.subj, CHAR) as Subj, CONVERT(j.Prop, CHAR) as Prop, CONVERT(j.Obj, CHAR) as Obj FROM `jena_g1t1_stmt` j WHERE LOWER(CONVERT(j.Obj, CHAR)) LIKE "%leo%" AND j.Prop = "Uv::http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#label"