Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data vs. Progress MarkLogic

We use Astra DB to improve our management systems. Storing data has become hassle-free and quite simple. When launching a Cassandra-based cloud application, Astra DB is exactly what you need. In addition to the standard training programs and videos, the extended support and training require significant additional effort to activate and cover which I feel is a bit more tedious task.

Incentivized

In an area where it will be built once and maintained, it shines. If you aim to use CI, temporary environments, or anything else, it is not very effective. Licensing is almost impossible on boxes that are to be created on the fly.

Incentivized

• We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
• Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
• A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.

Incentivized

• Indexing is a major strength of MarkLogic. The out-of-the-box configuration is set up to handle a combination of text and fielded data. The indexing is also highly configurable. Those configuration options are at the heart of a lot of our high-volume, high-performance applications.
• The industrial strength transactions and security are also a strength, particularly when we are dealing with user-created intellectual property.
• The engineering support is a strength. They are big enough to have a really strong support and engineering staff, but small enough so that a medium-sized customer has access to it. They are very responsive to questions and problem reports.
• The ability to move easily among XML and JSON is a strength.

Incentivized

• Astra DB might be difficult to understand for people who are unfamiliar with Apache Cassandra. Improving the initial experience for newcomers, as well as offering better documentation and lessons, might be advantageous.
• The Astra DB ecosystem may be enhanced by expanding the ecosystem of plugins, integrations, and community-contributed solutions.

Incentivized

• How to do complete data profiling on documents loaded in Marklogic database?
• Customers need a tools which can be customized to suit their data profiling needs but currently the tools which MarkLogic provides fall short on this requirement.
• Unit testing framework which is using only XQuery as the language is lacking some features.

Incentivized

Our firm has consultants for a number of technologies/disciplines. While I am capable and experienced in other areas, my preference is always to work on engagements with MarkLogic. As an architect and developer, I get far more flexibility and performance from one product instead of cobbling together a stack of several products to provide a capability that MarkLogic has rolled into one great product.

Incentivized

It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution

Incentivized

Very little about it can be done better or with greater ease. Even things that seem difficult aren't really that bad. There's multiple ways to accomplish any admin task. MarkLogic requires a fraction of administrative effort that you see with enterprise RDBMS like Oracle. MarkLogic is continually improving the tools to simplify cluster configuration and maintenance.

Incentivized

Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.

Incentivized

There's always room for improvement. Some problems get solved faster than others, of course. MarkLogic's direct support is very responsive and professional. If they can't help immediately, they always have good feedback and are eager to receive information and details to work to replicate the problem. They are quick to escalate major support issues and production show-stopping problems. In addition to MarkLogic's direct support, there are several employees who are very active among the community and many questions and common issues get quick attention from helpful responses to email and StackOverflow questions.

Incentivized

We also (briefly) considered building in-house. We wanted to avoid complex "Frankenstein" architectures. Combining Pinecone with another NoSQL datastore like DynamoDB would have increased complexity. A single-managed platform (Astra DB) enabled architectural simplicity and strong reliability, allowing Maester’s development team to prioritize high-value, customer-facing features

Incentivized

In comparison to both Mongo and HBase, MarkLogic wins in terms of integration to other systems, while loosing in terms of pricing. In terms of documentation all will be in same range putting MarkLogic a bit forward.

Incentivized

We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.

Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.

Incentivized

• Database growth planning is less of a concern with Astra, as it scales automatically.
• Currently, they lack fine-grained security at the table level. I suspect that will change over time.
• If your load has peaks and valleys; Astra enables only paying for Reads/Writes; thus you do not need to pay for large servers to support peaks in load.

Incentivized

• It took longer than expected to develop our application and get the level of consistent performance necessary. As a result, profit was flat for a couple of years but the benefits are really starting to kick in.

Incentivized