I have a varchar column 1000 characters in length but am unable to create an index on it. also i need to make this column unique aswell. does a fulltext index allow me to make this column unique aswell?If so whats the syntax?

fulltext indexes are not unique-able

try declaring your (normal) index on only a portion of the column

whats the max number of characters i can index?
whats the the syntax to declare the above (portion of column) and to make it unique? Please note the entire string needs to be unique not just a portion of it.

e.g. I have the following:

pd_name varchar(1000)

How about you check out the MySQL documentation to find out

Incidently, what is this column? What's in it? What does it represent? Why does it need to be 1000 varchars long?

and why would uniqueness need to be determined down to the 1000th character? surely if two values are different, they will be different in the first X characters...

not for the data am storing in it! The column contains smiles strings these are string notation of a molecular structure and can be the same even up to the 999th character.

how would you determine uniqueness on this?

me? i would break it up into several columns based on codons or telomeres, and define a single UNIQUE index on those columns

alternatively, i would upgrade to at least 4.1.2, because in that release, index prefixes can be as large as 1000 bytes