Hi,

One of our clients wants to crawl data that they store in SQL Database so I created a new External Content Type to test the solution and gave it a name of TestSql.

To crawl BCS content source, you need to give a default content access account or account you want to crawl you content source Execute permissions on External Content Type. Click on the Drop down and select Set Permissions. Add your search account and select Execute Permissions.

 

Next, you need to define new content source in Search Service Application administration. In order to do that, click on Content Sources category and then New Content Source.

Give your Content source a meaningful name, select Line of Business Data and select BCS Service Application where you External Content type is saved. Create Crawl Schedules and perform a full crawl of your Content Source.

 

When full crawl is finished you can search for your line of Business data. Go to your portal site and search for your data. Notice that link to that data is somewhat strange.

 

To correct this "issue" you need to create Profile Pages for BCS Data. Go back to your BCS Service application and on the Ribbon, in the Profile Pages section click Configure. You need to specify SharePoint site to host Profile pages.

 

When Profile page host is created, you can now Create/Upgrade Profile page. Select External Content Type and click Create/Upgrade button.

When operation is finished, perform a full crawl of this Content Source and you should now get results similar to this:

 

When you click on the link you get BCS Data directly from your SQL Server:

 

Hope it helps!

Enjoy!