About the Oracle Endeca Server

The Oracle Endeca Server software provides the query engine that serves as the foundation for all front-end applications utilizing it.

The software includes the Oracle Endeca Server, which is the management facility for administering the Endeca data stores. Front-end applications built on top of the Oracle Endeca Server can answer end-user queries and provide business analytics information to the front-application's users.

Note: The term Oracle Endeca Server is used in two related contexts — on the one hand, it is the name of the entire software package for the server. On the other hand, the Oracle Endeca Server is the management facility for administering your data stores.

The Oracle Endeca Server lets you administer your Endeca data stores. The Endeca data store is where the source data records are stored after being loaded from your ETL client. With the Oracle Endeca Server, you can:

Create an Endeca data store, including assigning a name that will later be used to access and manage it.
Stop and start Endeca data stores.
View the status of any Endeca data store.
List the jobs that are running on a specific Endeca data store.

In addition, the Oracle Endeca Server constantly monitors the status of the running Endeca data stores and will automatically restart them (for example, if one crashes).

As the query engine, the Dgraph process of the Oracle Endeca Server uses proprietary data structures and algorithms that allow it to provide real-time responses to client requests issued to the data store that is running on the server. The Dgraph process receives client requests via the application tier, queries the data files, and returns the results.

Each Endeca data store contains a set of versioned Web services for loading, configuring, and querying the data. These Web services, together with the Bulk Load Interface, provide the interface to the Oracle Endeca Server.

About the cluster of nodes

A cluster is composed of a set of nodes, all of which can serve query requests. Only one node is identified as the leader node; all other nodes are follower nodes. One copy of the data files is shared and used by all nodes. The Cluster Coordinator provides communication between the nodes in the cluster. It also notifies the reader nodes about index updates and updates to the configuration.

If one of the cluster nodes fails, queries continue to be processed by other nodes in the cluster. A cluster also provides increased throughput by the Oracle Endeca Server. By adding nodes to a cluster you can spread the query load across multiple Oracle Endeca Servers without the need to increase storage requirements at the same rate. Nodes can be added or removed dynamically, without having to stop the cluster.

In the development environment, you can start with a single Oracle Endeca Server that is not part of a cluster. (Without the cluster services, having a single running Oracle Endeca Server is a valid configuration for starting in the development environment.) You can then expand your single instance implementation by first building a simple single-node cluster configuration and then adding more nodes. When you move to a production environment, you can duplicate a multi-node cluster that you built in the development environment.

In this release, the cluster implementation requires that you download and install the Cluster Coordinator package. For information on configuring and running the cluster, see the chapter on clustering in the Oracle Endeca Server Administrator's Guide.