In recentyears,databaseresearchandproduct developmentactivities havefocusedonsupport for non-traditional data types, such astext or multi-media documents.This paper describes an approach of coupling SQL databasesand content-specific searchengines, such as fulltext retrieval engines,in an efficient manner.It is based on a query rewrite scheme that exploits so-called table functions, which are used to pass results from external search engines into the databaseengine. Using this approachthe content-specificindexing mechanismsof searchenginescanbeexploited without having to extend the databaseenginewith new accessmethods,or having to breakup the searchengine to map its indexing schemeto databaseindex structures.