Why Use Consolidation

Like most search engines, Exalead CloudView has a simple data model to provide good performance at query time. Unlike relational databases, it has only one table. This allows Exalead CloudView to have minimal query latency even on a very large corpus, but things get more difficult in the indexing phase when the original data model is more complex than what Exalead CloudView can support.

Object trees, often based on several relational database tables, have to be flattened to be used efficiently in Exalead CloudView.

Consolidation is very helpful when indexing relational data and handling this flattening during an incremental index build. In other words, it takes updates as they come instead of rebuilding the entire index when an object changes. The incremental update is a complex task as it requires calculating the impact of any changes and building complete documents according to projection rules. To do so, the Consolidation Server keeps track of object relationships and stores data to rebuild Exalead CloudView documents.

Note: The Consolidation Server is not limited to one data source. It can work across several data sources, which allows building documents based on objects coming from different sources. This avoids having an ETL or an equivalent tool to perform cross-source joins and aggregations.