Querying Data and Content
The Attivio platform provides a rich set of query capabilities for accessing information stored within Attivio's Universal Index. The first step in learning about the query capabilities of Attivio is to examine its query languages. The Simple Query Language of Attivio is familiar to anyone who has used a web search engine such as Google or Yahoo. The Advanced Query Language of Attivio provides expert users and automated systems with a more structured, functionally rich query syntax. One unique feature of the Advanced Query Language is that it supports a JOIN operator. This operator allows for SQL-style JOIN queries with the performance and fuzziness of full-text search.
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Query Languages
See the main article on Query Languages for an orientation to Attivio's Simple Query Language, Advanced Query Language, Relational Search (JOIN) feature, and the AI-SQL language.
Query Feature Reference
Attivio provides several unique query features that can provide an enhanced end-user query and subsequent navigation experience.
Queries, like any other messages in Attivio, are processed via a workflow. Queries are typically processed synchronously, as most query results are returned to a client application for display to the end-user; however, Attivio does support asynchronous query and response message handling through the Java Client API. The workflow-based architecture of Attivio allows for query processing loops; the Query Resubmission article describes several cases in which it makes sense to re-submit a query.
Attivio provides a rich infrastructure for activating queries. Activated queries can react in real time or at regular intervals to changing information within Attivio. They can also be configured to drive workflow actions such as sending alerts via email or writing records to a database. See Working with Rules Dictionaries for more information.
Attivio uses a number of caches when evaluating searches to improve search response time performance. Caches are used to evaluate sorting, facets, document boosts, and other search engine functionality. Configuring Query Caches describes how to configure the Attivio caches for optimal performance. Autowarm Search Caches describes how to configure Attivio to fill certain caches at start-up.
A reference list of all processing performed by Attivio at query time appears below.
Main Article | Description |
|---|---|
Guide for configuring default query and response workflows and defining custom query and response workflows. | |
| Rules | Create policy rules to flag indexed content |
| Query Builder | Support for creating Advanced Query Language (AQL) queries |
Support for spelling correction or AND-to-OR rewriting | |
If the query isn't in English, you must tell Attivio what language you are using. | |
Computing expressions on the result documents | |
Dynamic summarization and drill-down within results | |
Recommendation of facets for exploratory queries | |
Querying using relationships between documents using the JOIN operator | |
Location and geographic proximity queries and result filtering | |
Control ordering of query results based on relevance to a query | |
Ordering of query results | |
| Streaming Query API | Allows developers to request all results, facets, or document id's back from a query, and can be used to send large query filters to Attivio for reducing the number of returned results. |
Highlighting query words in results | |
Suggesting or correcting spelling errors in queries | |
Support for grouping results by field value | |
In-memory caches for queries, filters, facets, fields, and documents | |
Load caches for common queries |