ECL was initially designed and developed in 2000 as an in-house productivity tool within Seisint Inc and was considered to be ‘secret weapon’ that allowed [[Seisint]] to gain market share in its data business. The technology was cited as a driving force behind the acquisition of Seisint by [[LexisNexis]] and then again as a major source of synergies when LexisNexis acquired ChoicePoint Inc.
== Implementations ==
The first implementation of ECL in June 2000 translated the input ECL into a variant of SQL, to run on a (now retired) in-memory query engine known as hOle. Later in 2000 a second implementation of an ECL execution engine was created (known as Thor), which ran on a cluster of Windows 2000 servers, and the ECL compiler was extended to generate C++ code, which was then compiled using MSVC to create executable DLLs that the execution engine would load and run. In 2002 the engines were ported to Linux and the ECL compiler extended to support generation of Gnu g++ code. A third execution engine, designed for rapid repeated execution of similar queries (known as Roxie) was also developed around this time, using the same ECL compiler, language, and generated DLL technology.
