Attivio

Boston based Attivio (www.attivio.com) is founded by ex-FAST key people with Ali Riaz in the driver’s seat, and promises to bridge the gap between traditional Enterprise Search and traditional Databases/Information Warehouses.

Being less than two years old, the new company is already making headlines, and time (and customers) will reveal how much is pure product strenght and how much is the usual marketing blabla.

Many with DB background miss the ability to do real JOINs with traditional enterprise search engines, where typically DB tables need to be de-normalized and flattened before being indexed. For most use-cases that doesn’t cause a big problem, but for some applications the amount of redundancy in the engine just grows too big, and/or the flexibility of doing varied queries along other axis than the index was designed for, gets complicated or impossible.

The problem has been that a runtime JOIN is very costly – where RDBMS’s can spend minutes or hours computing a huge JOIN query, you expect from an Enterprise Search Engine that the result be ready in milliseconds. So if Oracle have not succeeded in combining unstructured search with large structured queries in an efficient way, how can a small startup do it? Or can they?

We’ll follow-up once the product, called Active Intelligence Engine^TM (AIE) has been prooven a bit more in the market.

And IF Attivio’s claims are correct, then both Oracle and Microsoft/FAST really have something to fear, because this is something the information retrieval world have been waiting for a loong time!

Note: Links are to Norwegian sites.

In a recnt post on Shahzad Rana’s (Microsoft’s most profiled OOXML promoter in Norway) blog, he comments on Håkon Wium Lie’s (Opera Software’s tech director and profiled standards promoter) wording in a comment to VG TV. Here, Lie introduces the term “Microsoft tax” to explain what happens when ordinary people feel forced to purchase MS-Office to read documents from the government or their kid’s scool. Lie says that the consequence of widespread use of Microsoft Office’s new document format OOXML, could be many more years of vendor lock-in since OOXML allows arbitrary non-standardized, non-open extensions. An example is if a parent recives a document from her kid’s teacher, which contains an Equation binary object, which is not part of the OOXML specification, and thus cannot possibly be implemented by other office packages wanting to support OOXML.

Futher, Rana asks Lie to produce some evidence of an OOXML document from a teacher to a student or parent that is only readable on Windows and MS Office, whereby Lie refers to an OOXML document that Rana himself had sent by email. A funny thing here is that Rana had to rename the .docx file as .doc to be able to upload it to WordPress. This caused a lot of trouble for the users, thus examplifying even stronger what kind of trouble the new format would cause for ordinary people. Rana should of course have zipped the file, or better, modified WordPress to accept .docx files for upload. But a MS supporter is probably not used to the idea of freely being able to modify ones own GPL software

Today, the deal where Microsoft buys FAST, was completed. That means that the Norwegian search engine vendor Fast Search & Transfer is now a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft.

The FAST ESP product will continue to be offered on all current platforms, and the FAST sales and tech organization continues to operate almost as before, so customers and users will not experience any noise around this transaction.

FAST, when under the MS umbrella, will of course increase focus within the MS Office Sharepoint segment, and will together with MS engineers make an even smoother packaging of the technologies to new and existing customers of high-end Sharepoint sites with large data volumes.

Expect to see continued innovation from FAST in the years to come, and expect also to see a shift towards stronger support for the Windows platform. It is a known fact that the Linux platform has been the most stable up until now for ESP, but now this might shift as Windows versions will get the major focus in QA and patching.

Let us not hope that the Linux, AIX and Solaris versions will be discontinued. I don’t expect that to happen in the short term, as the press release clearly states that they will be supported, and also this blog post by MS’s Kirk Koenigsbauer in the Sharepoint division states that “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice“. Let’s hope that lasts for many many years to come, so that history can be re-written in this area.

Congratulations, Microsoft, with an excellent new member organization

Congratulations, John Marcus Lervik with the new role of leading MS’s Enterprise Search Business!

See also official press release and FAST’s customer FAQ

Today, March 26th is Document Freedom Day (DFD). The whole computer industry (perhaps except from Microsoft and friends) focus on interoperability and open document formats this day.

This of course links nicely into the debate about whether ISO should adopt Microsoft’s fresh OOXML format which basically is an XML-ification of legacy MS-Office binary document formats, as international standards based on the ECMA draft document, or whether the industry is better suited cooperating on today’s ISO standard for office documents, the Open Document Format (ODF).

The discussion some times looks like a war, and Microsoft has spent a lot of energy (and money, some claim) the last months in persuading the national ISO bodies to vote for their format, so that they can claim to be standards compliant rather than being forced to implement ODF, which MS view as a serious threat to their solid MS-Office monopoly. This has been carefully created over the last decade, locking users into buying and upgrading their MS-Office software to be able to read the latest and greates .doc, .xml and .ppt files being sent from business partners and friends. Being forced to support ODF in MS-Office will mean the beginning of real competition on the Office-suite market since the major barrier for interoperability, the document format, is removed.

To learn more about free document formats and the Document Freedom Day, visit http://www.documentfreedom.org/

In this blog post, Sesam annonces that their middleware architecture, Sesam Search Application Toolkit (SESAT) is released as open source software. This is the piece of software (written in Java) which sits between the portal (such as sesam.no) and the data sources (such as FAST ESP, Yahoo! or a database) and dispatches in parallel a single user query into multiple underlying requests and returns everything according to business rules. This is often referred to as federated search.

Here’s Sesam’s own description of the software:

“SESAT is search middleware and a search portal framework. SESAT enables a single user query to be dispatched to multiple information sources. The result is analysed, weighted and presented to the user according to configurable business rules.”

Congratulations with contributing to Open Source, Sesam! And good luck with creating a community around this important piece of middleware, we’ll see more and more demand for it in the future!

Now, go check it out on http://sesat.no/ if this is something that can be useful to you!

PS: Learn more about other federated search solutions at the federatedsearchblog.com