Oracle



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Migrating from

Oracle Ultra Search

To

Secure Enterprise Search (SES)

Version 2, April 22, 2008

Starting with RDBMS 11g Release 2, Oracle UltraSearch will be discontinued and no longer be included as part of future Oracle product sets (Ultra Search is a search engine tool for finding public documents on corporate Web servers, databases, mail servers fileservers. Currently, UltraSearch is a feature of the Oracle Database, Oracle iAS/Portal, and Oracle Collaboration Suite) Oracle Secure EnterpriseSearch (SES) is a newer, faster and more secure product built on the technolgies originally developed for UltraSearch. Customers using UltraSearch are strongly recommended to migrate to Secure Enterprise Search.

This document is intended to to help customers plan and implement their migration process. The following groups of customers might be impacted:

1. Database customers starting with 11gR2

2. Customers upgrading their Application Server from AS10 to 11

3. Customers currently using Oracle Collaboration Suite

Impact on Oracle Application Server, Portal and Collaboration Suite

Ultra Search is currently included as part of Oracle Application Server Portal. It allows for indexing of ‘public’ Portal pages (Portal pages available to anyone, not behind the Portal login). There is also a ‘Portlet” that allows customers to put a search/result box on their Portal pages. All customers upgrading from 10g Portal to 11 would be impacted as the UltraSearch functionality will be absent in AS 11 shiphome and mid tier.

Ultra Search in Collab Suite was added to allow for indexing web pages outside OCS. A built-in search application based on federation is used for searching the other components of Collaboration Suite (Oracle Files, Mail, and Calendar). UltraSearch was not designed to directly access and index content in Oracle Files, Mail, and Calendar – instead customers wishing to search emails, documents, and scheduling items were provided with a built-in search application for the purpose.

Oracle SES provides for all of the functionality of Ultra Search in AS Portal and Collaboration Suite:

• SES indexes both public and private ASPortal pages

• It provides a Portlet (replacing the Ultra Search Portlet) allowing customers to put Search on their Portal pages

• SES has connectors that can directly index content in Oracle Files, Email, and Calendar.

Migration Considerations

There is no automatic migration process between UltraSearch and Secure Enterprise Search. Once SES is installed, administrators will need to manually recreate the data sources and schedules which existed on their UltraSearch installations, and recrawl those sources.

There are many new features in SES not included in UltraSearch. This document considers only features which have changed, or existed in UltraSearch, but are not present in SES.

1. Combined Install: UltraSearch was installed as part of the install process for various products, such as RDBMS and Oracle Portal. Secure Enterprise Search has its own download or CD, and its own simple install process.

2. External Database: UltraSearch could be installed into an existing Oracle database. SES has its own embedded database. It can only use that database, and the database is not available for other purposes.

3. Java Query API. For embedding UltraSearch into customer web sites and applications, Ultra Search provided a Java Query API. SES does not support the same API, but instead uses a more standards-based Web Services API. UltraSearch applications written using the Java API need to be rewritten to use the SES Web Services API. A special section below is intended to help customers by explaining the new web Service API and differences to UltraSearch.

4. Multiple Search Instances: UltraSearch supported the concept of multiple search instances with different collections of documents in each. SES has only a single search instance. Instead, the "source group" feature should be used to divide documents into seperate collections, or if required, multiple installations of SES can be used instead.

5. Remote Crawler. UltraSearch could run a crawler remotely on a seperate machine. Since most of the work of crawling is either on the source side, or in the database itself, this was of little benefit from a performance point of view, and the feature was not implemented in SES. Although this should have little effect on performance, it could have implications on systems where the crawler was run remotely for security reasons - for example the crawler ran outside of a firewall. Administrators looking to migrate should bear this in mind and plan their crawling architecture appropriately.

6. Snapshots: Snapshots do not exist in SES. Instead, you should use the Metadata Backup and Recovery feature. Note that metadata recovery does not copy the indexes - sources must be recrawled and reindexed.

7. Administrator Security Model: UltraSearch had "superusers" and "instance administrators". Since SES does not use instances, this model is simplified, and there is a single administrative user, “EQSYS”.

8. Database Table Crawl: A table crawl of an Oracle database table could be set up in UltraSearch with a trigger to notify of changes to the table. This feature is not present in the simple "Table Source" in SES. Users should instead look at the more sophisticated "Database Source" which allows a column of the table or view to contain a "Last Modified Date". This can be set or updated by a trigger if appropriate.

9. Custom Crawler Agents: Secure Enterprise Search maintains the old UltraSearch crawler agent API for compatibility purposes only (the API is undocumented and deprecated). UltraSearch custom crawler agents should work with SES for public sources only (the security framework is not compatible). Any custom crawler agents which implement document-level security will need to be rewritten using the flexible plugin API in SES. Public crawler agents should work, but customers are strongly urged to move to the new API, as the old one may be dropped in a future version of the product.

10. Deployment Strategy: UltraSearch patches were supplied with the patchset for the product UltraSearch originally shipped with (for example RDBMS or Application Server). Secure Enterprise Search patch releases are separate from other products. Product upgrade policies may need to be reviewed in the light of this change.

Ultra Search Java API vs. SES Web Services API

Unlike UltraSearch, which is pure Java, SES uses a combination of WSDL and SOAP.

To simplify the migration of your code from UltraSearch, you may want to read the WSDL to determine which functions are available. You can then use SOAP, an XML-based mechanism for exchanging typed information, to actually call one of the search-related functions listed in the WSDL (Web Services Description Language).

We suggest that you follow these steps to migrate your code to SES (or develop a new application):

1. You need to obtain a proxy for the SES web service. To provide the simplest possible start for SES developers, SES provides client-side Java proxy libraries.

SES supports several SOAP methods; these are described in an accompanying WSDL file located at (the WSDL spec is also in an appendix in the SES Administrator's Guide). Import this WSDL file into your favorite web services programming environment, or use your own custom Java library to call the service. Many web services toolkits can take a WSDL file and automatically generate a client-side proxy to call the SES Search API.

2. Now you are ready to develop an application (e.g. a JSP page) that uses the SES web service (indirectly through the helper and the proxy):

• Initialize the search context, and set the web service end point. The endpoint location needs to be set to the correct endpoint in the invoking code. For example, when using a Java client library, this is done by invoking the setSoapEndpoint() method of the client stub context.

• After initialization, you can issue search requests to SES's index and receive results as structured data, use filters to restrict your search results by attribute, suggested links, alternate words and any number of other functions. Search can be performed within while SES instance as well as within data groups. The OracleSearchResult object, returned by SES, has member variables holding the individual result items.

Much of the work of your page will be done by scriptlets and you may want to consider separating the UI from your scriptlets by using a template technology like, for example, Freemarker.

Search results are returned as object OracleSearchResult, which has an array of ResultElement objects. Any of its member variable values can be displayed as per your business requirements. SES provides methods for the following common functions (many, but not all of these functions were available in Ultra Search before):

1. Obtaining all existing data groups, attributes (for example, the resulting lists of attributes can be used for subsequent advanced search operations), and other useful information internally held in search engine tables.

2. In SES, search can be made secure by using new authentication APIs (UltraSearch was restricted to public search).

3. Setting properties for a search request (e.g. total number of hits).

4. Suggested Links. The OracleSearchResult object holds an array of Suggested Link class objects, including the suggested link title and URL as member variables.

5. Alternate Keywords (e.g. "SES" -> "Secure Enterprise Search"). The OracleSearchResult object has a member variable holding alternate keywords.

6. Similar Documents. Unlike UltraSearch, SES provides detection of duplicate and near-duplicate documents in the search results.

The URL to the SOAP endpoint is . The WSDL spec is also in an appendix in the Admin Guide. An overview of the SOAP API is in the chapter titled "Oracle Secure Enterprise Search APIs", also in the Admin Guide.

Useful downloads are available on the SES page on Oracle Technology Network (OTN) , at . A complete Web Services Sample App is located there as a resource that's available for developers who would like to understand the Web Services API in detail.

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