A method, computing device, and a non-transitory computer-readable medium is provided for facilitating a context-aware search on documents stored in an unstructured database column. The database server determines whether a document stored in an unstructured database object is marked up according to a recognized markup language. Documents that conform to the markup language are indexed with value-to-node mappings and node-to-physical-location mappings to provide a context-aware search of marked up nodes within the documents. Documents that do not conform to the markup language are indexed with value-to-document mappings to provide a full-text search of the documents. The database server evaluates a context-aware search against documents that conform to the markup language within the unstructured column without requiring the user identify the documents as XML documents and store the documents in an XMLType structured column.