TREX is a search engine in the

SAP NetWeaver SAP NetWeaver is a software stack for many of SAP SE's applications. The SAP NetWeaver Application Server, sometimes referred to as WebAS, is the runtime environment for the SAP applications and all of the mySAP Business Suite runs on SAP WebAS: s ...

integrated technology platform produced by

SAP SE Sap is a fluid transported in xylem cells (vessel elements or tracheids) or phloem sieve tube elements of a plant. These cells transport water and nutrients throughout the plant. Sap is distinct from latex, resin, or cell sap; it is a sepa ...

using columnar storage. The TREX engine is a standalone component that can be used in a range of system environments but is used primarily as an integral part of SAP products such as Enterprise Portal, Knowledge Warehouse, and Business Intelligence (BI, formerly

SAP Business Information Warehouse SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) is SAP’s Enterprise Data Warehouse product. It can transform and consolidate business information from virtually any source system. It ran on industry standard RDBMS until version 7.3 at which point it began to t ...

). In SAP NetWeaver BI, the TREX engine powers the BI Accelerator, which is a plug-in appliance for enhancing the performance of

online analytical processing Online analytical processing, or OLAP (), is an approach to answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries swiftly in computing. OLAP is part of the broader category of business intelligence, which also encompasses relational databases, repo ...

. The name "TREX" stands for Text Retrieval and information EXtraction, but it is not a registered trademark of SAP and is not used in marketing collateral.

Search functions

TREX supports various kinds of text search, including exact search, boolean search, wildcard search, linguistic search (grammatical variants are normalized for the index search) and fuzzy search (input strings that differ by a few letters from an index term are normalized for the index search). Result sets are ranked using term frequency-inverse document frequency ( tf-idf) weighting, and results can include snippets with the search terms highlighted. TREX supports

text mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...

and classification using a

vector space model Vector space model or term vector model is an algebraic model for representing text documents (and any objects, in general) as vectors of identifiers (such as index terms). It is used in information filtering, information retrieval, indexing and r ...

. Groups of documents can be classified using query based classification, example based classification, or a combination of these plus keyword management. TREX supports structured data search not only for document metadata but also for mass business data and data in SAP BusinessObjects. Indexes for structured data are implemented compactly using

data compression In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression ...

and the data can be aggregated in linear time, to enable large volumes of data to be processed entirely in memory. Recent developments include: * A join engine to join structured data from different fields in business objects * A fast update capability to write a delta index beside a main index and to merge them offline while a second delta index takes updates * A data mining feature pack for advanced mathematical analysis

History

The first code for the engine was written in 1998 and TREX became an SAP component in 2000. The SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator was first rolled out in 2005. As of Q1 2013, the current release of TREX is SAP NW 7.1.

Security

A security vulnerability in TREX was first identified and fixed in 2015 ). The vulnerability occurred due to lack of authentication in TREXnet, an internal communication protocol. The aforementioned patch fixed the problem by removing some critical functionality. Later on, ERPScan head of threat intelligence Mathieu Geli continued to look into the vulnerability and found that the vulnerability was still exploitable. Moreover, in case of successful attack, the vulnerability would allow a remote attacker to get full control over the server without authorization. The vulnerability has been finally patched via SAP Security Note 2419592.

References

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External links

SAP NetWeaver

SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence

SAP NetWeaver Business Information Management

Search and Classification (TREX) on SAP Community Network
SAP NetWeaver Information retrieval systems Business intelligence