Database Crawler-Follow URL

Question

Hi,
I am trying to crawl an external SQL Server database using SharePoint 2013 Search engine.
The database has a table that holds URL of documents published in a SharePoint 2010 site. I would like to know if SharePoint 2013 crawler will be able to follow the document urls in the DB table columns to crawl the document contents stored in SharePoint
document library?
Thanks,
Thanks, Bivsworld

Answer 1

Hi Bivsworld,
According to your description, I did a test as the followings:
Create a table in a SQL database, and create a column to store the URLs of some documents stored in SharePoint libraries.
Create an External Content Type using the table.
Create a content source for the external content type.
Crawl the content source.
I used the following article as a reference:
http://www.sharepointinspiration.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=5 .
After crawling, I checked the Crawl log of the content source, only the items in the SQL database table was crawled, the content of the documents were not crawled.
So, for your question, SharePoint 2013 crawler don’t follow the URLs of documents stored in DB table column to crawl the content of these documents.
Best Regards,
Wendy
Wendy Li
TechNet Community Support