Introduction

The RDB via Table connector features include the following:

• Connects to a database server using JDBC drivers (which must be downloaded separately)
• Performs full crawling
• Performs incremental crawling, so that only new or updated documents are indexed, using tables to hold identifiers of updated content
• Fetches data from the database using SQL statements
• Is search engine independent
• Runs from any machine with access to the given database

Environment and Access Requirements

Repository Support

JDBC Drivers

The RDB via Table connects to databases via JDBC, so you'll need the appropriate JDBC client (driver) JAR file for the database you want to connect to. These are available for most (if not all) major database vendors, and your first port of call for the driver should be the vendor's website.

Account Privileges

A prerequisite for crawling any RDBMS is to have an RDBMS account. The recommended name for this account is "aspire_crawl_account" or something similar. The username and password for this account will be required below.

The "aspire_crawl_account" will need to have sufficient access rights to read all of the documents in the RDBMS that you wish to crawl.

To set the rights for your "aspire_crawl_account", do the following:

1. Log into the RDBMS as an Administrator.
2. Make the role of the "aspire_crawl_account" either administrator or superuser (so that it has access to all RDBMS content).

You will need this login information later in these procedures, when entering properties for your RDB Connector via Table.

Environment Requirements

No special requirements here

Framework and Connector Features

Framework Features

Connector Features

The connector can operate in two modes: full and incremental.

Important:  The data submitted to Aspire by this connector is dependent entirely on the SQL that's configured. Therefore, it is quite possible to submit all of the data in an incremental crawl, or only some of the data in a full crawl.

Full Mode

In full mode, the connector executes a single SQL database statement and submits each row returned for processing in Aspire.

Incremental Mode

In incremental mode, there are three stages of processing: preprocessing, crawling, and post-processing.

1 - Pre-processing

(Optional) This stage runs a SQL statement against the database that can be used to mark rows to crawl (i.e., they have changed since the previous run).

2 - Crawling

This stage (similar to full mode) executes a single SQL database statement and submits each row returned for processing in Aspire. Typically, the result set is a subset of the full data that may be filtered using information updated in the (optional) pre-processing stage.

3 - Post-processing

(Optional) Each row of data submitted to Aspire can execute a SQL statement to update its status in the database. This may be to reset a flag set in the (optional) pre-processing stage, thereby denoting the item as processed. Different SQL can be executed for rows that were successfully processed versus ones that were not.

Click here to find out various crawling options

Content Crawled

The content retrieved by the connector is defined entirely using SQL statements, so you can select all or subsets of columns from one or more tables. Initially, the data is inserted into Aspire using the returned column names, but this may be changed by further Aspire processing.

The RDB via Tables connector is able to crawl the following objects:

Limitations

No limitations defined