How To Create An Index Using Import Data, Create An Indexer

In my previous article I created an Azure Search service as shown. To know how to create an Azure Search Service you can read Part One here.

How To Create Azure Search Service - Part One

How to create an Index using Import Data, Create an indexer

In this article, I’ll show how to add an index on search service.

We can do it in two ways,

By using Add index button.
OR use Import data

Here, using import data we will create an Index.

STEP 1 - Click on Import data

Open the search service as we have created in the previous article -> click on Import data

STEP 2 - Click on Data source

STEP 3 - Choose Data Source

Using the below options select a data source

I selected the Azure SQL Database

STEP 4 - Create New Data source

Name: Enter new data source name – ‘awsearch’
SQL Database – Select an SQL Database, I will use the already existing database [‘awsearch’]

I created a SQL database [using adventurWorks] with name ‘awsearch’ as shown. I’ll show in another article how to create a SQL database using an Azure portal.

For this article, I will use this existing database.

STEP 5 - Test connection

Enter the credentials that you have used while creating the database and click on test connection.

Connection is validated and we can see a table/View as shown.

STEP 6 - Select Table/View

Select the table name as salesLT.customer from the dropdown list.

Select the customer table and click OK.

STEP 7 - Cognitive Search

Cognitive search is the enterprise search that makes use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to return results that are more relevant to the user or embedded in an application issuing the search query. To know more about cognitive skills, click on Learn More.

NOTE

As shown above, Cognitive Search is only available in South Central US and West Europe only

STEP 8: Customize Target Index

Click on Index

The information that appears on the screen states,

It will provide a default index for us as shown.
We can delete the fields which are not required.
Once the index is built, deleting and changing fields will require re-indexing of documents

Index Name

Select a name for your index. Follow the guidelines for specifying index name as shown.

Select Key

I Selected customerId as the key field.

As shown, the index can have only one key field and that must be a string field and retrievable.

Select Fields

Select fields in the index, delete the one you don’t need by right-clicking on the field and click on delete as shown.

So, I selected fields,

CustomerID
FirstName
LastName
ComapnyName
EmailAddress
Phone
ModifiedDate

Set Filters controls

We have five controls in an index that we can set on these fields,

Retrievable
Filterable
Sortable
Facetable
Searchable

Retrievable

Select the fields for which we want documents to be retrievable as part of search results.

Searchable and retrievable

If you want the documents to be searchable and retrievable then select both and we could search based on any of the data in these fields

Filterable and sortable

As the name suggests, we could do filtration and sort on the search based on the selected fields for selected controls.

Facetable

It’s a filtering mechanism that provides a self-directed drill down in search applications. In short, we can say that the category is used to filter the results. To know more, read this MSDN doc here; in this article, the below figure clarifies what facets are.

Select the filters and Click OK

STEP 9 - Create an Indexer

Indexer Name

Enter the name for the indexer, it must alphanumeric and no uppercase, only lowercase letters, digits and dashes as shown in the validation.

Schedule

It will show the schedule of your indexer, it can be,

Once
Hourly
Daily
Custom

Schedule it for hourly. We can see the high watermark column, which keeps our index up to date with database

I selected Modified date. If this has changed,since the last time we did the indexer, then update this in the index as well.

To track the deletions, check the Track deletions checkbox and select the soft delete column and specify the value to configure the soft delete policy,

For now, uncheck the track deletions and click OK.

Here, we can see that Indexers are now created successfully and success=1

Also, indexes contain the index name, document count and storage size.

STEP 10 - Run Indexer Manually

Now, go to the indexer,

Select the name of the indexer, we see no documents have succeeded and no history for this indexer.

Click on Run and create the indexer manually and select ‘Yes’

On the extreme right notification pane, we can see the notification as

Index summary shows the execution history and execution details with success status,

Now, go back again and click on Indexers, here we go,

Indexers with success details, docs succeeded as shown below.

Summary

In this article, we saw how to create an index using Import data, saw search filters [Retrievable, Filterable, Sortable, Facetable, Searchable] used for the fields, created indexer, and ran it manually.

Happy reading!