Search Architecture
Topic Last Modified: 2006-11-06
Important
Use Exchange Web Services to search for items in the Exchange database. For more information see Web Services.
The Exchange store is a vast store of resources in a single infrastructure, and search capabilities are provided for locating specific items or to create views of resource data. You can search for items in the Exchange store using a familiar Structured Query Language (SQL) syntax, which is based on the syntax defined by the Microsoft Indexing Service Query Processor.
When searching the Exchange store using Microsoft® ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) or OLE DB, search results are returned in Recordset or Rowset objects. When searching using WebDAV, results are returned as XML elements in the body of an HTTP response.
Indexing properties and implementing full-text indexing improves search performance. For more information about these capabilities, see Indexing.
If you are using WebDAV, you can create Search Folders to persist search results in a folder addressable by URLs and also searchable by other queries.
The Microsoft Indexing Service search engine operates by using a system account, enabling it to read all stores, including private mailboxes. To maintain security, Rowset objects returned from an SQL query are evaluated against the access control list (ACL) of the item or folder searched and the security identifier of the user. Any row in which grant access is restricted is removed before the search result is returned.
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