The JDBC Crawler collects data from a JDBC-accessible databases based on a SELECT-statement in the DataSourceConnectionConfig. Any of the columns of the database record returned by the SELECT-Statement may be mapped to an attribute of the SMILA record in the Attributes section of the DataSourceConnectionConfig.

To overcome certain shortcomings of some JDBC-Drivers concerning the handling of really large data sets, the crawler features an optional grouping mechanism enabling it to retrieve data in well defined frames from the database and thus avoid OutOfMemoryExceptions.