EQL allows you to issue a request against normalized records, using record-to-record relationship filter expressions. These types of requests are called Record Relationship Navigation (RRN) queries.
If you have different record types in your source data, you can keep the records uncombined by using a Switch join in your pipeline. Then, by issuing an RRN query, the MDEX Engine can apply a relationship filter to the records at query time. Depending on how you have tagged the properties on the records, an RRN query can return records of only one type or of multiple types.
For example, assume that you want to have three record types
(Author
records,
Book
records, and
Editor
records). To define the record type, all the
records have a property named
Recordtype
(the actual name does not matter).
Author
records have this property set to
“author”
,
Book
records have it set to
“book”
, and
Editor
records use a value of
“editor”
. In your pipeline, you use a Switch join to
leave those records uncombined. You can then filter
Book
records via relationship filters with
Author
and
Editor
records, but the returned records (and their
dimension refinements) will be
Book
records only. This means that any other query
parameters apply only to the record type that is returned.