Earlier this week I participated in a discussion thread on LinkedIn regarding the usage of the WCF SQL Adapter in BizTalk Server and I wanted to summarize some of my thoughts and the recommended best practices regarding this particular scenario.

Basic Requirement

Using the WCF SQL Adapter in BizTalk, we need to issue a select statement against multiple tables in SQL Server through the use of INNER JOINs.

At several of our clients, we have integrated the Google Search appliance into a Portal.  In order to accomplish this integration we could take 1 of 2 approaches:

1.     Utilize GSA’s built-in ability to format the presentation logic via a XLST.

At several of our clients, we have integrated the Google Search appliance into a Portal. In order to accomplish this integration we could take 1 of 2 approaches:

1. Utilize GSA’s built-in ability to format the presentation logic via a XLST.

2. Utilize GSA’s ability to return straight XML.

Both approaches work well and can suit the needs of a portal. Option 1 though will not work if you need to sort the entire result set prior to displaying it to the users. The reasons for this is as follows:

In order to provide searching within the portal a strategy had to be defined with how to integrate Alfresco with GSA. There were two approaches considered:

1. Utilize the traditional approach and have GSA crawl Alfresco through either a webscript mechanism or via CIFS.

2. Utilize the GSA Feed based approach.

After careful review we decided upon the feed base approach for the following reasons:

1. Meta Data: In order to support the Faceted searching, we need to find a way to attach metadata to each content item. Given that our HTML code is just snippets and does not contain a header with this information and that we are indexing documents, the only way to reliably accomplish this was via the feed.