MarkLogic 5, and why you might care
MarkLogic is releasing MarkLogic 5. Key elements of the announcement are:
- More-of-the-same in line with MarkLogic’s core positioning.
- A new bi-directional Hadoop connector.
- A free MarkLogic Express edition, limited in license terms more than in actual features, as per Slide 27 of the deck MarkLogic graciously supplied for me to post.
Also, MarkLogic is early with a feature that most serious DBMS vendors will soon have – support for tiered storage, with writes going first to solid-state storage, then being flushed to disk via a caching-style algorithm.* And as befits a sometime search-engine-substitute, MarkLogic has finally licensed a large set of document filters, from an Australian company called Isys. Apparently, the special virtue of the Isys filters is that they’re good at extracting not only text, but metadata as well.
*If there’s a caching algorithm that doesn’t contain a major element of LRU (Least Recently Used), I don’t recall ever hearing about it.
MarkLogic seems to have settled on a positioning that, although distressingly buzzword-heavy, is at least partly based upon reality. The real part includes:
- MarkLogic is a serious, enterprise-class DBMS (see for example Slide 12 of the MarkLogic deck) …
- … which has been optimized from the getgo for poly-structured data.
- MarkLogic can and does scale out to handle large amounts of data.
- MarkLogic is a general-purpose DBMS, suitable for both short-request and analytic tasks.
- MarkLogic is particularly well suited for analyses with long chains of “progressive enhancement” (MarkLogic’s favorite term when talking about derived data).
- MarkLogic often plays the role of a content assembler and/or search engine, and the people who use MarkLogic in those ways are commonly doing things that can be described as research and analysis.
Based on that reality, MarkLogic talks a lot about Volume, Velocity, Variety, Big Data, unstructured data, semi-structured data, and big data analytics.
My November, 2010 overview of MarkLogic technology remains pretty relevant. One correction, however: Node heterogeneity configurations, in which “data” and “evaluation” nodes reside on separate servers, are the exception rather than the rule.
Like Vertica, MarkLogic has laudably said that true academic researchers can get MarkLogic for free without the severe license restrictions. Free MarkLogic should be of particular interest to researchers who:
- Are studying natural networks or graphs, such as social networks or biological pathways. (This might be a fit in the social or biological sciences.)
- Are managing metadata for, say, a variety of disparate kinds of experimental files. (This might be a fit anywhere in the natural sciences.)
- Are managing actual documents, images, videos, etc., or data about such things. (This might be a fit in the humanities or social sciences.)
MarkLogic provided some disclosable financial substance by email, which I shall quote verbatim:
- MarkLogic has 45% revenue growth and 55-60% license growth year over year.
- We expect to finish this year with over $85 million in revenue, up from $55 million last year.
Arithmetical purists might note that 85/55 is more than 145%, but I’m just going to settle for the information I got and move on.
Edit: I posted separately about the MarkLogic Hadoop connector. As for that Hadoop connector – stay tuned for a short follow-up post, as writing about it now would not be convenient. (My backup discipline isn’t what it should be, and the only copy of my notes about that product is on a heavy tower computer in a house that doesn’t have working power.)
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