(From the archives: I wrote this over 2 years ago, but never hit publish. At last, the tale can be told!) If you haven’t seen it, the keynote at MarkLogic World 2013 is worth a look. I was on stage demonstrating new Semantics features built into MarkLogic server. Two of the three demos were based on…
Category: Mark Logic
This past weekend marked my five-year anniversary at MarkLogic. It’s been a fun ride, and I’m proud of how much I’ve accomplished. It was the technology that originally caught my interest: I saw the MarkMail demo at an XML conference, and one thing led to another. The company was looking to expand the product beyond…
This week marked the MarkLogic World conference and with it some exciting news. Without formally “announcing” a new release, the company showed off a great deal of semantic technology in-progress. Part of that came from me, on stage during the Wednesday technical keynote. I’ve been at MarkLogic five years next month, and the first piece…
MarkLogic 6 launched today, and it’s full of new and updated goodies. I spent some time designing the new Application Builder including the new Visualization Widgets. If you’ve used Application Builder in the past, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the changes. It’s leaner and faster under the hood. I’d love to hear what people think…
A lexer might seem like one of the boringest pieces of code to write, but every language brings it’s own little wrinkles to the problem. Elegant solutions are more work, but also more rewarding. There is, of course, a large body of work on table-driven approaches, several of them listed here (and bigger list), though…
I’m getting ready to leave for MarkLogic World, May 1-3 in Washington, DC, and it’s shaping up to be one fabulous conference. I’ve always enjoyed the vibe at these events–it has a, well, cool-in-a-data-geeky-way thing going on (like the XML conference in the early 2000’s where I got to have lunch with James Clark, but that’s…
I’ve been thinking a lot about big data, and two recent items nicely capture a slice of the discussion. 1) Alex Milowski recounting working with Big Weather Data. He concludes that ‘naive’ (as-is) data loading is a “doomed” approach. Even small amounts of friction add up at scale, so you should plan on doing som…
There’s been an increasing amount of talk about MVC in XQuery, notably David Cassel’s great discussion and to an extent Kurt Cagle’s platform discussion that touched on forms interfaces. Lots of Smart People are thinking in this area, and that’s a good thing. A while back I recorded my thoughts on what I called MET, or…
MarkLogic 5 is out today. Here’s five things beyond the official announcement that developers should know about it: If you found the CQ sample useful, you’ll love Query Console, which does everything CQ does and more (syntax highlighting!) Better Search API support for metadata: MarkLogic has always had support for storing metadata separately from documents….
What’s that on your TV screen? Why, it’s MarkLogic, again. Why President Obama Picked the Bay Area And it’s true, we’re hiring big time. Maybe your resume should be in that pile… -m
Thought experiment: are there any commonly-expressed semantic queries–the kind of queries you’d run over a triple store, or perhaps a SearchMonkey-annotated web site–expressible in common type-in-a-searchbox query grammar? As a refresher, here’s some things that Google and other search engines can handle. The square brackets represent the search box into which the queries are typed,…
I wish I could say I had something to do with the planning of this: part of Balisage 2010 is a contest to “encourage markup experts to review and to research the current state of wiki markup languages and to generate a proposal that serves to de-babelize the current state of affairs for the long…
Brief note: The W3C XProc specification, edited by my partner-in-crime Norm Walsh, has advanced to Recommendation status. Now go use it. -m
The new MarkLogic developer site is up, cleaner, better organized, and more social. Even cooler, it’s an XSLT-heavy application running on a pre-release version of MarkLogic. The new blog gives some of the details of the new site and transition. So, if you’re already a MarkLogic developer, this is a great resource. And if you’re…
Working at MarkLogic has forced me to recalibrate my expectations around XML-related performance issues. Not to brag or anything, but it’s screaming fast. Conventional wisdom of avoiding // in paths doesn’t apply, since that’s the sort of thing the indexes are made to do, and that’s just the start. Single milliseconds are now a noteworthy…
Are you coming? Link. It starts on May 4 (Star Wars day!) at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco. Guest speakers include Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and Michelle Manafy, Editor-in-Chief of EContent magazine. Early bird registration ends Feb 28. -m
I got a personal email pitch from recruiters at both Facebook and Google, oddly enough both messages within a 3-minute window on a Monday morning. Hiring is on the uptick again, it seems. My team is still looking for the right front end engineer–someone who knows the JavaScript language in depth, how to use semantic…
Excellent article in Wired, perhaps a good explanation of my career. :-) Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. Which sounds like a fairly typical spec review at Mark Logic. Hint: we’re hiring–email me….
Check out the updated careers page, including a quote from YT. If you’re looking for an amazing place to work, get in touch with me. In particular I’m looking for top-notch JavaScript/FE/UI people. -m
One of the lead bullets describing why XForms is cool always mentions that it is based on a Model View Controller framework. When building a full XRX app, though, MVC might not be the best choice to organize things overall. Why not? Consider a typical XRX app, like MarkLogic Application Builder. (You can download a…
I’ll be speaking next Tuesday (Oct 27) at the Northern Virginia MarkLogic User Group (NOVAMUG). Here’s what I’ll be talking about. Application Builder consists of two main parts: Search API to enable Google-style search string processing, and the actual UI wizard that steps users through building a complete search app. It uses a number of…
Come learn more about Mark Logic and get a behind-the-scenes look at the new Application Builder. I’ll be speaking at the NOVA MUG (Northern Virginia Mark Logic User Group) on October 27. This turns out to be pretty close to the big Semantic Web conference, so I’ll stick my head in there too. Stop by…
Several folks have been pointing to this article which has some choice quotes along the lines of If we examine the nontrivial-sized DBMS markets, it turns out that current relational DBMSs can be beaten by approximately a factor of 50 in most any market I can think of. My employer is specifically mentioned: Even in…
Come join me at the Demo Jam at Balisage this year. August 11 at 6:30 pm. There will be lots of cool demos, judged by audience participation. I’d love to see you there. -m
I’m thrilled to announce MarkLogic 4.1 and with it my project App Services, is here. Top-of-the-post props go out to Colleen, David, and Ryan who made it happen. You might already know that MarkLogic Server is a super-powerful database slash search engine powering projects like MarkMail. (But did you know there’s a free-as-in-beer edition?) The…
Balisage, formerly Extreme Markup, is the kind of conference I’ve always wanted to attend. Historically my employers have been not quite enough involved in the deep kinds of topics at this conference (or too cash-strapped, but let’s not go there) to justify spending a week on the road. So I’m glad that’s no longer the…
Another anniversary this week, one year at Mark Logic. Much of it in stealth mode, but more details of what I’ve been up to are forthcoming. -m
I’ve always thought that the EXSLT model of developing community specifications worked well. Now a critical mass of folks has come together on a similar effort, aimed at providing extensions usable in XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery, and other XPath-based languages like XProc. Maybe even XForms. Check it out, subscribe to the mailing list, and…
The remarkable (and prolific) Stephen Wolfram has an idea called Wolfram Alpha. People used to assume the “Star Trek” model of computers: that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer. Which has proved to be quite distant from reality. Instead But armed with Mathematica and…
From the company home page, reknown XSLT trainer and friend G. Ken Holman has expanded his offerings to include XQuery training. The first such session is March 16-20, alongside XML Prague. I’ve always thought there is great power in having both XSLT and XQuery tools at one’s disposal. I’ve seen people tend to polarize into…