MarkLogic Cerebral Cortex Edition

Last month we had an internal blog-writing competition, and creativity was key. Mike’s post below was the winning entry — probably because the sentiment resonated so strongly with each of us! We hope you enjoy it as much as the judges did — The Editors

Can I install MarkLogic in my head? It would be so much easier if everything that went in and out of my brain were automatically saved to MarkLogic. I need MarkLogic: Cerebral Cortex Edition.

I’m tired of writing to-do lists on Post-Its, and then losing them. I want to keep a daily journal of the interesting things that happen every day — without the work that goes into writing a daily journal. I want to be more productive at work, and stop being so forgetful. MarkLogic could help me with all of this.

I want MarkLogic to store and index all the interesting stuff that I don’t have the chance to record. I want it to take notes about all the topics I discussed with an old friend over lunch. Or save the million-dollar idea that popped into my head while jogging. I want MarkLogic to capture the sights and sounds of my family vacation, instead of having to pull out my smartphone and press Record. I need MarkLogic to remember the mundane things. What did my wife tell me to pick up at the store? Was it milk or eggs?

For busy weeks at work when I have lots of important meetings, I can scale up my MarkLogic installation. I can add extra E-Nodes behind each eye and D-Nodes to my cerebellum. When things slow down, I can scale down, and the tiered storage feature can offload older data to Amazon S3. (My head would actually be in the Cloud!) MarkLogic could even stay running at night when I sleep, and record my dreams. (Of course, it would use REST for that.)

I know there are also times in my life that I won’t want to remember. Like when I make mistakes, get in arguments, or experience a broken heart. Maybe I can get an early-access copy of MarkLogic 9 and use the new redaction feature.

Think of what it would be like to have every moment of your life saved as XML, JSON, RDF triples, or free text. To have your sensory organs constantly streaming information to binary sound and video files that you could play later. With MarkLogic at work in your head, your thoughts don’t have to be structured. (I have plenty of unstructured data that needs organizing. Have you seen my desk?)

Years from now, when my grandkids ask my what life was like back in the olden days, I could just hand them a thumb drive.