Big, Fast XQuery: Enabling Content Applications

Increasingly, companies recognize that most of their important information does not exist in relational stores but in documents. For a long time, textual information has been relatively inaccessible and unusable. Database applications allow relational data to be used and re-used; the architecture of relational database systems allow such applications to function even in the face of large amounts of data. XML and XQuery now allow the creation of a new kind of application that unlocks content in a similar way: a content application. In this paper, we examine the technologies that enable content applications to operate at scale in the context of MarkLogic Server.