David Cassel

I just published an XQuery library to GitHub to convert lines of Comma Separated Value data to XML. That can probably be done more simply if you don’t care what the XML looks like, but I wanted to build templates so that I could get good structure. I also built in an action mechanism, so that [...]

MarkLogic has long had the ability to spawn tasks, consisting of a module, a set of variables and some options. Those tasks go into the task queue and get worked off by the configured number of threads. A new feature in MarkLogic 5 gives a new option: higher priority tasks. Let’s take a look at [...]

I’ve started a couple posts lately, only to find them more complex than expected. So to get myself back on the board, tonight you get a pretty simple one, based on an error one of my colleagues encountered recently. Suppose we have an int range element index set up on <count/> in our MarkLogic database. xdmp:document-insert( [...]

Today I get to give you a sneak peak into a feature that’s not yet officially present, but you’ll find if you know where to look: XQuery-level integration with ImageMagick! In this post I demonstrate automatically scaling down large images for CurioVault.com.

MarkLogic 5 includes the Express license, which allows for small production deployments. I decided to take advantage of that to put onto the web a little hobby site I’ve had in prototype mode for a year or so. I’ve collected lapel pins since 1984. In that time, I’ve gotten more than 150 and I’ve started [...]

At MarkLogic, I work on a team that is charged with building Proof-of-Concept systems quickly and building them well enough that the developers who take over later will have a good starting point. I’d like to talk more about the framework that we’ve built to help us with those goals in future posts, but for [...]

Update (8 Mar 2012): Amazon has changed their prices again. Let’s see what the math tells us now. These numbers assume you want to run a web site 24×7, using the Heavy Utilization pricing on Reserved instances: Small: ($195 + $0.016/hour * 8760 hours/year) / 12 months = $27.93 per month Large: ($780 + $0.064/hour * 8760 [...]

When you point a MarkLogic application server to some source code, that code can either reside on the file system or in a modules database. Here are some reasons why you might pick one of those over the other. Modules Database Deploying code is a transactional update — there’s no need to worry that the [...]

In XQuery, you can build an element one of two ways: computed or direct. Direct This is the simpler case, so I’ll take it first. Direct means that your XQuery code has the XML you want to build: declare namespace blog = “http://davidcassel.net/blog”; <blog:example simple=”true”>   <blog:pointless/> </blog:example> XML is a natural data structure for [...]

The team I’m working recently put together a set of coding standards for our XQuery work. This team was generally happy to do so and we came to agreement on a set of standards pretty quickly. The exercise brought to mind a time at a previous company where two of us started discussing aloud whether [...]