Gary Bloom telling crowd about new features in MarkLogic 7

The Big Data Nation tour pulled into Dallas last Thursday and was met by a large and intellectually engaging crowd. A quick poll of the audience showed that they were up on the vernacular – but struggling with the concepts of what big data could mean for them (and their careers). Some were with universities – where colleagues were looking to them to create platforms for scientific research on bioinformatics. Others were with companies trying to figure out if there were new ways to approach fraud and analytics. And still others were just wondering; Is there just a better way to do things in general?

MarkLogic CEO Gary Bloom keynoted to get the room warmed up on the Art of the Possible. He described the FAA’s Emergency Operations Network (EON), which uses MarkLogic as the backbone to monitor and track emergencies and severe weather, and includes a dashboard that is updated in real-time for crisis management. And of course he piqued curiosity when he spoke of the BBC delivering 2.8 petabytes of data on the busiest day, or how 14 journalists dynamically created 10,000 athlete pages.

Bloom left it to the panel to peel away the mysteries and shed some light on how MarkLogic does it. For people who live in the relational world the idea of a database without columns and rows is hard to envision. What is the data model? How do you query? How do you join? How can a NoSQL database be transactional? How can it be consistent? Jason Hunter, chief architect of MarkLogic, received and volleyed with participants who had done their homework and brought their questions. One gentleman, a consultant who had done a fair share of “peppering” during the session, finally sat back, arms folded and nodded. “This sounds good,” he allowed.

Intel’s Greg Khairallah described how Intel’s enterprise-hardened HDFS integrates natively with MarkLogic to give companies alternatives for storing data inexpensively, allowing valuable information to “rotate” back into MarkLogic as needed.  All that data needs to be interacted with, and Pure Discovery is an up and coming Dallas-based firm that provides a presentation layer that builds through machine learning. Concept clustering allows knowledge managers and researchers to discover information – -versus search it. Pure Discovery on MarkLogic provides the richest experience – as researchers can mine to the actual asset.

And Tony Jewitt, VP Big Data for Avalon Consulting LLC, who has worked with all of the vendor partners on the panel, virtually gushed at the possibilities now available to companies: How smart parking lots can transmit information that tells the lot operator how many vacancies are available while alerting drivers as to where their cars are. How customers are finding new insights in analytics that are mashups of structured and unstructured.

Really, Gary is right. MarkLogic enables the art of the possible. Next stop: Atlanta.

Big Data Nation Tour: Dallas from MarkLogic.