In part 1 of this 2-part series, we explore the importance of metadata, its capture, and the context, meaning, and insight it adds to make your data machine interpretable—easier to understand so that it can be used to drive more value across your business and to customers. Now in part 2, we'll demonstrate how to connect and query any data—including SQL—and metadata with a single, powerful tool: the MarkLogic Optic API.
Our revolutionary Optic API blends the relational world with rich NoSQL document features by providing the capability to perform joins and aggregates over documents. One of the enabling features, Template Driven Extraction, makes it possible to create a relational lens over documents stored in MarkLogic by using templates to specify the parts of a document that make up a row in a view. You can access that data, including relational, graph, document, and—coming soon in MarkLogic 11—geospatial data, using either SQL or the Optic API.