I am confused about the way Azure Search incorporates external databases.
I need to build a system that lets the user search for files in multiple different databases at the same time to find their physical location. What keeps me from doing that in azure search?
Thanks in advance Jo Du
Azure Search Service will search for data in its indexes only. It can't directly search in external databases.
What you could possibly do is populate your Search Service Index with the data from these external databases. For this first you would need to create Data Sources. For each external database, you would create a separate data source. A data source essentially tells Search Service from where to fetch the seed data to populate an Index.
Then you would create an Indexer (think of it as a bridge between your Search Service Index and your Search Service Data Source - An indexer will connect to your data source, fetches the data and populate the index with that data). You would need to create multiple indexer, each indexer targeting a separate data source but points to same index.
When these indexers run successfully, you will see the data from these different databases come into your index. Then you will be able to search in this index.