Discovering Endeca Information Discovery - Part 1

Last fall, Oracle acquired Endeca, entering the world of unstructured data management. At this year's Rittman Mead BI Forum, Adam Ferrari, former CTO of Endeca and now an Oracle colleague introduced the capabilities of Endeca Information Discovery (EID) to the gasping crowd. His demo included a live analysis of the #biforum twitter stream.

Intrigued as I was, I logged on to Oracle's Software Delivery Cloud and downloaded the EID Quickstart Package 2.3 to take the product for a ride on my laptop during my flight back from Atlanta to the ol' country.

In this and the following posts, I would like to tell the tale of my discoveries.

The Endeca Quickstart Application

1. Prerequisites

Before you attempt to install EID, ensure that your machine has a 64-bit Microsoft Windows OS and 4 GB of free RAM.

2. Installing EID Quickstart 2.3

After unpacking the download package, you will find the installer and a QuickStart PDF reference document. The document guides you through the process of installing EID and loading the Quickstart demo data.

The installer simply asks for a destination folder and then resumes to put a little more than 1 GB of files on your disk.

EID consists of the following components:

• Endeca Server: hosting the data stores
• Endeca Studio Server: a tomcat server to support the Studio web application
• Endeca Studio: the web front end for EID
• Endeca Integrator: based on Eclipse, mostly for creating and running ETL with the CloverETL engine

In the Windows Start menu you will find two folders:

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery 2.3.0 contains shortcuts for launching the Integrator, starting and stopping the Studio Server and to access the Studio application in your default browser.

Oracle Endeca Server 2.3.0 contains the necessary shortcuts for starting and stopping the Endeca Server.

When you search the web for more information on Endeca you will find Elio Idema's blog (endeca123.com). Most of the postings are a must-read for any Endeca beginner. Elio even provides a script to create a Windows service for the Endeca server.

3. Resources

As mentioned above, endeca123.com is a great resource for Endeca-related information. Of course, you should also check out the Endeca product page on OTN.

Make sure that you watch the youtube videos created by the Endeca team.

The OracleEID youtube video channel.

The official Endeca documentation can be found here.

In the next post, we will learn how to provision the Quick Start sample application.

have a nice day

@lex