Search Rocks

My colleague Jason and I were talking about search — which spilled into a 3-day exchange of emails between us — with me trying to work from the metaphor of dance and synchronization and he with engines and cars. (Talk about rigid data structures).

Then like a bluebird, I received this gem from him.

Plan on seeing bits of his prose creep into our marketing.

Google shows us that search rocks

Wouldn’t it be great if everything worked like that

Why doesn’t it?

Because most tech uses relational databases

So are search engines the answer?

No because all they do is search

You need infrastructure

A place to store data too — safely, surely, securely

A way to do rich query not just text search

An understanding of structure, but forgiveness of messy structure

Immediate indexing not the delays you usually see with search engines

With all the benefits of search

Relevance understanding

Amazing speed

Massive scale

What you want is a database built on search technology

That’s MarkLogic

A NoSQL database that thinks in terms of documents

Enterprise-grade so the data is safe, secure, always available

With ACID transactions

Updates happen immediately

But built using search-style indexes

To support the hardest queries, whether they’re search or traditional database

All the speed and scaling you expect of search

But not limited to just search

And way better than relational

Which, let’s be honest, sucks.

MarkLogic

Diane Burley

Responsible for overall content strategy and developing integrated content delivery systems for MarkLogic. She is a former online executive with Gannett with astute business sense, a metaphorical communication style and no fear of technology. Diane has delivered speeches to global audiences on using technologies to transform business. She believes that regardless of industry or audience, "unless the content is highly relevant -- and perceived to be valuable by the individual or organization -- it is worthless."