RockyCode

In order to improve performance and scalability, sometimes it makes sense to turn html (embedded with some tag library or Xquery code) into real XQuery code. It can then be put in the Modules database making it immediately available for use. This is just like what Java Server Pages does!

Beyond standard query optimization in MarkLogic, scalability and performance can often be dramatically improved by using strategies or patterns that avoiding making database queries.

The demo is the presentation given at the 2011 MarkLogic Conference.

My first xquery experience has been on the MarkLogic platform. The project that we just released was written entirely in xquery and on that platform. As our site continues to gains popularity, we continue to realize how little about xquery we knew or know. Sometimes and in some places, the site is just really not that performant. "But I thought MarkLogic/xquery is super-scalable," some exclaim indignantly. If you do it right, an Oracle relational database can be made to scale. Done wrong, a MarkLogic database can be made to not scale at all. There's a lot to be ...

I was running an SQL query today and it was sooooo slow. So slow, in fact, that it never returned. I asked the DBA, Reed, who built the table what might be up, and he informed me that it was not indexed. And proceeded to show me some cool stuff I could do to actually get my query to return. In the end, it was a comparison between the "not in" operator and a "left join".

Often when coding, we use a single local variable multiple times, overwriting the value many times. It is considered good practice to move the variable out of the looping overwrite and into the smallest scope of code that is run once. But, this makes the code a little bit less concise. So, how useful is it, anyway? I wanted to run a few little tests and see if there's really a noticable difference in performance.