Search structured and unstructured information

There are compelling business reasons to implement a single enterprise search system that covers both your structured and unstructured data repositories. You could hear one reason from the corporate General Counsel since the need is grave during legal discovery, a state where most large companies perpetually find themselves.

However, actually building something that gives end users the power of SQL queries with the simplicity of traditional search is hard. Andrew McKay, senior vice president of products for Attivio Inc. in Newton, Mass. claims his company's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) "has the precision of SQL and the fuzziness of search."

He says not only can the software index and store a database's tabular content, the AIE will also note the potential joins among the tables. If an end user's search request could benefit from joining the tables and yielding the answers, McKay says the AIE is smart enough do the joins and combine the information with the search results.

Results are automatically grouped into topics in a navigation pane. You can set unanswered queries to alert users or systems when newly indexed data creates an answer.

Shipping this week, AIE 1.2 takes up a mere 20 MB of storage capacity. However, it can index up to one hundred million documents per server. McKay says you can add hardware on the fly without having to re-index the other servers. Pricing varies.