My Three Favorite New Features of MarkLogic 5

There are three new features in MarkLogic 5 that I am especially excited to see: better binary content handling, configuration importing and exporting, and retrieving the original URL of the request before URL rewriting.  All of these save me development time and amount of code that I need to write.

Better binary content handling

MarkLogic has always been able to store binary files in the database, but if the files were too big or if you had too many files, your caches may have been adversely affected and your database merges may have taken longer than they needed to. In the past, when we had a lot of binary content that we wanted to serve off of a MarkLogic-powered website we would keep the binary files on the files system and just put the metadata file in the MarkLogic database. This worked fine, even streaming the files off the filesystem through MarkLogic, but we had to code the implementation and we always had to make sure the metadata files were in sync with the binary files on the filesystem. We don’t have to do this anymore with MarkLogic 5.

MarkLogic 5 introduces Rich Media Support which means that large binary files are handled differently than XML and text files under the covers in the server. There is a configurable threshold for the size of a binary file to be considered “large” as to be handled in a more efficient way. These large binary files are handled by MarkLogic as efficiently as if you saved them to the filesystem yourself. But you don’t need to use an special API or different functions that you would use for the XML and text files. You just insert the file using xdmp:document-insert() and MarkLogic will handle the rest.

Configuration importing and exporting

The Administration Interface on port 8001 provides a nice graphical, point-and-click interface for managing and configuring a MarkLogic installation. But for mature implementations, you’ll probably want a way to declare the settings for the servers, database, forests, etc. and script the configuration changes. There are several good implementations that do this outside of MarkLogic, but now you can just export the settings of an installation and get the full configuration settings in a XML file. You can import this XML file into a separate machine to stand up an installation with the exact same settings. You can also check in the configuration settings file into source control, make changes to it, and re-import the file back into the MarkLogic installation to affect those changes. As part of troubleshooting you can take a fresh export of the settings of an installation and compare those settings to the configuration settings file you had in source control to see if there were any inadvertent changes to the installation.

Getting the original URL of the request

This may seem to be a minor feature but one that can save me code and complexity. It’s always been possible to get the request URL from within XQuery code by calling xdmp:get-request-url(). But this returns the URL after the URL rewriter has rewritten the URL. What if you wanted to get the URL before the URL was rewritten? In previous versions of MarkLogic you’d have to get the request URL (by calling xdmp:get-request-URL()) in the URL rewriter itself and adding the original URL as a parameter to the rewritten URL. For example,

fn:concat("/new/url?orig-url=", xdmp:get-request-url())

Then in subsequent code you’d get the original URL by getting the request field, like xdmp:get-request-field("orig-url"). That works but it can be a pain if you forget to add the URL as a parameter, or you make in error in the code to retrieve it. But now in MarkLogic 5 you can just call xdmp:get-original-url() which will return the URL as it was before the URL rewriter changed it. Less code I have to write. Less complexity. Fewer bugs.

MarkLogic is fast in terms of performance but also in terms of development time. I spent ten years in the Java world and time-to-market was extremely important, and is still is now. I have never been able to implement mature, high-performance, enterprise solutions faster on any other platform than on MarkLogic. The new features of MarkLogic 5 that excite me the most are the ones that reduce that time-to-market for me even more. Most if not all of these features are the results of customers lobbying for them, and MarkLogic has listened. I have been vocal about binary content handling and now it’s part of the server. I’m looking forward to this new version so I can continue to push the boundaries of delivering solutions for my customers in less time and with less risk.