Oracle SES11 in Beta
October 3, 2009
Oracle has put some wood behind its Secure Enterprise Search product. The current version is SES10.1.8 G. You can download this system at this Oracle link. I learned from one of my two or three readers that Oracle has moved SES11 into beta mode. The product manager of the beta is Stefan Buchta. If you want to test the system, you can obtain his email address and more information at this Oracle link.
As I was getting up to speed, I noticed that Oracle had available a new white paper, dated January 2009. The addled goose was ashamed of himself. He missed this document in his routine scan of the Oracle Overflight reports.
After downloading the white paper “Secure Enterprise Search Version 10.1.8.4”, the addled goose noticed some interesting items; to wit:
The white paper reports “sub second query performance”. My question was, “What’s the index size, refresh and query load, and system infrastructure? Throwing hardware at a performance problem is often a way to resolve performance issues, and my hunch is that SES10g can be a computational glutton.
Second, among the enhancements listed was “security”. Hmm. Security has been a feature since version 9i as I recall. I wonder how security has been improved because the “full security” for search requires the licensing of the Oracle security server which may no longer be required, but somehow I doubt that Oracle has bundled this component with the plain vanilla SES10g product.
Third, SES10g seems to use the word “repository” in concert with the phrase “Oracle 10g database”. My recollection is that the “database” can be prone to certain Oracle bottlenecks related to intensive disc reads. Performance, therefore, is easy to talk about but may be expensive to deliver. But since we have not tested this most recent build, maybe the bottlenecks have been resolved. I have heard that Oracle is a Google partner and that some of the applications folks at Oracle are using the Google Search Appliance, not SES10g. Maybe this is an aberration?
Fourth, the crawler can handled structured and unstructured data. I know that SES10g can deal with structured data. That is a core competency of Oracle. I am not 100 percent that the unstructured data challenge has been fully met. Customers want hybrid content systems and the market is heating up. Autonomy’s SPE is a challenger because the Oracle solution may not be the home run that the white paper suggests. Autonomy is quite savvy when it comes to exploiting opportunities created by large players who don’t deliver fully on the market collaterals’ assertions.
Fifth, connectors get more attention. The list of connectors on page 25 of the white paper seems to lag what’s offered by the Lucid Imagination open source search system and is even farther behind connectors available from Coveo, Exalead, and others in the search and content processing sector. Surprisingly, connectors for MicroStrategy (close to Clarabridge), Business Objects (SAP and Inxight), and Cognos (IBM) have been removed. Well, that’s one way to get Oracle shops to adopt Oracle’s in house and acquired business intelligence components.
The white paper concludes with a snapshot of the AT Kearney knowledge portal. EDS bought AT Kearney and then the partners of AT Kearney bought the firm from EDS in 2005. Since that time, AT Kearney has been chugging along. It ranks among the blue chip consulting firms and is still working to meet the lofty goals set forth by Andrew Thomas Kearney in 1929. I wonder if Oracle is an AT Kearney client. I will have to check.
The knowledge portal interface reminded me of the Clearwell Systems, Coveo, and Exalead interfaces by the way.
In short, the white paper struck me as a modest update to the previous Oracle white papers. I did not see a reference to the vertical vocabularies that were once available for Oracle content processing systems. The architecture did not strike me as significantly different. Performance gains probably come from using Intel’s multi core processors and the larger memory space enabled with 64 bit support.
Take a look. I have no pricing data at this time.
Stephen Arnold, October 3, 2009
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