MarkLogic Takes Olympic Coverage From Probable Nightmare to Practical Success

February 26, 2013

Most people never really think about how news organizations transmit data across continents when there is a big event. For the Summer Olympics in 2012 The Press Association relied on MarkLogic’s XML repository’s ability to store and query hundreds of thousands of pieces of metadata per second.

In “How PA Cleared The Big Data Hurdle At The London Olympics” the Press Associations director of technical architecture, John O’Donovan, gives consumers an in depth look at how the office was able to cope with more than 50,000 requests per second.

“The problem with that is having to sit down and design a relational database model that can represent everything that’s in the XML. That takes quite a lot of time, you have to build all of your input/output extenders and map XML objects into relational stores.”

At first look it seems like an impossible task, organizing all of the photos, biographical information, statistics, and competition results for thousands of athletes and beaming it to televisions, phones and computers everywhere, but, by removing the relational database the PA made it possible.XML store instead of storing it in the relational database and then retransferring the data back to XML.

It simplified the delivery system from 100 to 34 man hour days to get off the ground and was so successful that The Press Association will be utilizing the new system for all of its wire and output communications.

Big thumbs ups to MarkLogic’s ability to handle the process and to the PA for finding a new way to utilize an already reliable resource.

Leslie Radcliff, February 26, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Data, News, XML

Comments

3 Responses to “MarkLogic Takes Olympic Coverage From Probable Nightmare to Practical Success”

ttuncut on February 26th, 2013 12:23 am

RT @BeyondSearch: MarkLogic Takes Olympic Coverage From Probable Nightmare to Practical Success: http://t.co/gD370EyGn4
peteaven on February 26th, 2013 10:47 am

RT @BeyondSearch: MarkLogic Takes Olympic Coverage From Probable Nightmare to Practical Success: http://t.co/gD370EyGn4
jpcs on February 26th, 2013 11:29 am

RT @BeyondSearch: MarkLogic Takes Olympic Coverage From Probable Nightmare to Practical Success: http://t.co/gD370EyGn4

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.