It’s May 12, 2009 the first day of the MarkLogic User Conference. Welcome, to those of you who just arrived. And, hello to those of you keeping tabs on us from elsewhere. Here’s a brief conference update to get things rolling today.
Yesterday, Monday, May 11, attendees from all over the globe arrived for this, the largest XML conference in North America. Day 1 attendees convened for a pre-confernece day of training, which included, among other things, an introduction to MarkLogic, XQuery, XPath, and more.
“The class was game for a challenge,” said MarkLogic’s Matt Turner, “and, with the help of 6 teaching assistants, we completed a lab where each student executed a series of queries building from one liner xpaths to a full query to return HTML search results.”
“I try to mix it up the class a bit and we had a look at some live applications like Springer’s Authormaper, Cooking with the Bible and BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange as well highlighted some of the sessions like the feature previews from the server team,” Turner said. “The class was also very forgiving of my telling bad jokes (including the only XQuery joke that qualifies as funny: “An XQuery engine walks into a relational database bar and the bartender says, ‘we don’t serve your kind here’. The XQuery engine says ‘I node dat!’” Badda boom!).”
The course also included several pop quizzes and a few folks walked away with iPods as prizes.
Later in the day attendees were provided an overview of the MarkLogic Server architecture provided by scalability and performance guru, Michael Blakeley.
The day ended with the official Opening Reception where attendees mixed and mingled and a few lucky folks got to meet up with author of the best selling book, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki.
Today, the conference roster is jam-packed with really great sessions. I’ll be blogging from the event all day (and into the night) on both the official MarkLogic User Conference Blog and I’ll be posting tidbits from each session via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and a host of other social media sites.
For those of you tracking my commentary via Twitter, you can easily do so here. And, don’t forget, if you are taking photos of the conference and uploading them to Twitter, or writing blog posts or Tweets about the event, use this tag: #mluc09. That way, those wanna be attendees who could not, for one reason or another, escape from their cubicle farms will be able to see what their missing from the comfort of their workstations.
Okay, now to find some coffee.
