Azure Search for SQL Server Blob Column

Question

I have a table [Assets] on Azure SQL Server with columns (Id, Name, Owner, Asset). The [Asset] column is varbinaryblob type that store PDF files.

I would like to use Azure Search to be able to search through the content of this column. Currently Azure Search can be directly used with Blob Store or exclusively for table store however I a am not able to find a solution for my scenario, Any help in terms of approach is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Azure Search SQL indexer doesn't support document extraction from varbinary/blob columns.

One approach would be to upload the file data into Azure blob storage and then use Azure Search blob indexer.

Another approach is to use Apache Tika or iTextSharp to extract text from PDF in your code and then index it with Azure Search.

Answer 2

Is it possible for you to create a SQL VM, sync your data on SQL Azure with the VM with SQL Data Sync, then sync data on the SQL VM with Azure Search as explained here?

Another option is to move your SQL Azure database to a SQL VM on Azure, then sync data on SQL VM with Azure Search as explained here.

Hope this helps.