Our customers are always telling us that our LRS is the most feature-rich platform on the market. We love hearing that type of positive feedback and we love adding new features that solve our customers' requirements. Recently we’ve realized how difficult it can be for our users to have to learn the MongoDB Aggregation Language to create complex queries on things like xAPI context extensions. We've been working for a long time on developing a new language for defining and simplifying how you ask Veracity Learning to generate a graph visualization. We’re tentatively calling it the Veracity Query Language (VQL).
We'll publish a much longer overview and tutorial on VQL in the near future, but for now, you can try it out for yourself here!
The VQL language design goals include:
- Offering a simpler way to support more common operations than just the MongoDB aggregation language.
- Including operations specifically relevant to xAPI (rather than a generic database language).
- Merging graphing configuration with data query and analysis.
- Switching between different database and processing technologies, using the system best for a given task. Our implementation can use ElasticSearch, JavaScript and MongoDB, sometimes within the same query!
- Allowing the chaining of queries, such that the results of one query can inform the next query.
- Separating data search and filtering from the data processing stages.
Ready to try it out? The next version of Veracity Learning will utilize this technology under the hood for all analytics operations. In the meantime, you can Try VQL Here!