AIE's Query-time JOIN Capability

Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine™ (AIE) dynamically joins all related content and data matching a single query — with no advance data schema required. This vital functionality is provided by AIE's patent-pending query-time JOIN operator.

Table JOIN Unlike a relational database (RDBMS), AIE does not require relationships between data and/or content to be pre-defined prior to ingestion. AIE also retains the logical structure of databases, unlike legacy search tools and other information products that must "flatten" databases in order to ingest them, resulting in denormalization of data and greatly diminished business value.

With one query, AIE enables users to access and analyze all types of information, regardless of source or format, to discover new relationships and correlations between data and content that lead to all-new business insights.

Attivio's patent application covers querying joined data within a hybrid index, with the following innovations:

No pre-defined data schemas, relationships or modeling required to JOIN related data or content. AIE's query-side JOIN is far more flexible and simpler to implement than SQL JOINs for relational databases, enabling IT to quickly fulfill increasing user demands for new combinations of information
Seamlessly integrates new data and content. Add new data tables and content to AIE at any time, ready to JOIN with other existing information, without re-ingestion of information
Loads structured data on a table-by-table basis without "flattening", which loses key data relationships and impairs business value of data
Enables selection of relationships across multiple data tables, dynamically connecting common fields to represent one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many relationships
Retrieves all related data and content at query time. In addition, related content is presented with the most highly relevant content first

The traditional methods for accessing unstructured content and structured data are divided: enterprise search engines are used for finding content, and database technologies are needed for retrieving data. Most database methods do not search content, and those that do manage only the content that specifically stored and maintained within database tables. On the other hand, legacy enterprise search engines were not originally designed to look at databases, leaving their contents out of search results. More recently, some search engines now pull in databases, but they typically "flatten" them in order to ingest them, denormalizing the data and losing its relational quality — the main business value of databases.

Attivio's query-side JOIN has solved this problem of assembling data from both content sources and databases without losing the data relationships. Attivio's query-side JOIN capability is the key to this breakthrough in information access functionality, culminating in AIE, combining the best capabilities of data warehousing and business intelligence (DW/BI) with enterprise search.

This exclusive patent-pending capability developed by Attivio is not found in any other information access product, making AIE the most comprehensive unified information access (UIA) platform available today.