Configuring full text search capabilities

In InfoSphere® MDM Advanced Edition, you can enable full text search capabilities that let users use a simple string to search for physical MDM entities.

Because full text searching empowers users to search a data set, using a simple string, for information across all fields (or specific fields), they are much more powerful than traditional InfoSphere MDM searches, which only consider a predefined set of fields. To improve performance, the full text search capability uses a search index that is synchronized with your MDM data.

Note: When full text search is enabled, you can configure other applications such as the MDM AE/SE user interface and the IBM Stewardship Center to use it as well. For more information, see the following topics:

Overview of the full text search capability

InfoSphere MDM provides full text search capabilities for physical MDM by integrating InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition with an Elasticsearch server. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine. It stores your MDM data in a search index, and lets you perform and combine different types of searches. It allows you to search for information in any of the fields stored or to search for information in a specific field.

By default, the InfoSphere MDM implementation synchronizes Person, Organization, and Contract entities into the Elasticsearch index. This means that full text searches can return matching results from Person, Organization, and Account entity records within a single result set.

With full text search integration using Elasticsearch, a data steward can run different kinds of searches that use both conventional and unconventional attributes as criteria. For example, full text searching enables a data steward to search for customers in New York who were born in 2000 and are unmarried. Another data steward might use the capability to get list of Whole Life contracts with a current cash value amount of $10,000. These kinds of searches were not possible with InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition before.

Note: The Elasticsearch service is installed as part of an installation or upgrade to InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition 11.6.0.7 to 11.6.0.10.

Beginning in 11.6.0.11, Elasticsearch is no longer packaged as part of InfoSphere MDM. You can continue to use full text searches that leverage Elasticsearch in your InfoSphere MDM solution, but you must deploy and configure your own Elasticsearch server. For more information about Elasticsearch and to get started with a free trial, see the Elasticsearch web site.