About entities

Entities provide you with intuitive, conceptual views on top of various categories in your data. They reflect the relational complexity between categories of data that is present in the Oracle Endeca Server's flat data model, but that is not immediately visible.

An entity (or view, in Studio) represents a logical set of records that are derived from the physical records by aliasing, filtering, and grouping. An entity has its own metadata, which include names, types, and display names of the attributes, and the names and definitions of metrics.

Note: In Studio, entities are known as views. The Entity and Collection Configuration Web Service interface is used by Studio to create and manage views. For information on creating and managing views in Studio, see the Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Studio User's Guide.

When you create entities on top of various data categories, you map business concepts to complex data structures, based on how you would like to analyze data. Entities reestablish the relationship between categories of data once all data is loaded into the Oracle Endeca Server.

You define entities by specifying metadata on them, such as their metrics. This allows you, as the data architect, to inform the business analyst about the relationship between different categories in your data, and to suggest metrics that can be requested on the entities. For example, metrics can provide information on which entities are useful to be grouped by, or to be aggregated upon.

Once you create entities, they serve as (aggregated) logical views of your data, allowing business analysts to run analytic queries on them.

You create entities using the putEntity or putEntities operations of the Entity and Collection Configuration Web Service. You can only create entities if the underlying attributes are already defined in your schema and exist in your data domain.