MarkLogic Server is a multi-model database that has both NoSQL and trusted enterprise data management capabilities. The vendor states it is the most secure multi-model database, and it’s deployable in any environment. They state it is an ideal database to power a data hub.
$0.01
per MCU/per hour + 0.10 per GB/per month
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.
If you are storing META data then MarkLogic is super useful as it retrieves everything so fast, while storing the whole data shows performance issues some times. If you have legacy systems then migrating from it would really require sweat and blood, on the other hand if you are in systems like Node.js you can simply integrate two systems easily. If you don't know how in the end your your data schema will look like then it's better to make a prototype using MarkLogic.
I am over our HR data, and we use Workday for our HR management system. I have a script in place that runs reports on Workday and saves the results as CSVs. I can then use stages in Snowflake to insert these CSVs into Snowflake, then I can insert or truncate and replace these staged tables into a final schema. Then once these are in a schema I can reference them and build out my data models. In addition to ingesting CSVs, Snowflake has the ability to write a CSV file to our Amazon S3 bucket. Ingesting these CSVs, transforming the data, then delivering it to a destination would've involved so much more coding than my current process if we were on any other platform.
Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
MarkLogic still has a long way to go in fostering the developer community. Many developers are gravitating to the simple integrations and do not delve into the deeper capabilities. They have made tremendous strides in recent months and I am sure this will improve over time.
Many of the best features are left on the floor by enterprises who end up implementing MarkLogic as a data store. MarkLogic needs to help customers find ways to better leverage their investment and be more creative in how they use the product.
Licensing costs become a major hurdle for adoption. The pricing model has improved for basic implementations, but the costs seem very prohibitive for some verticals and for some of the most advanced features.
This tool is very much technical and proper knowledge is required, so mostly you have to hire an IT team.
I wish if various videos could be available for basic quires like its initiation, then I think it would act as a guideline and would help the beginners a lot.
MarkLogic is expensive but solid. While we use open source for almost everything else, the backend database is too critically important. At this point, re-tooling for a different back end would take too much time to be a viable option.
SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
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.
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
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.
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
We had Fast in place when Microsoft had bought it up and was going to change / deprecate it. One of the biggest advantages of MarkLogic for search actually had to do with the rest of the content pipeline - it allowed us to have it all in one technology. On the NoSQL side, we looked at MongoDB a couple years back. At that time, MarkLogic came in stronger on indexing, transaction reliability, and DR options. For us, that was worth using a commercial product.
I have had the experience of using one more database management system at my previous workplace. What Snowflake provides is better user-friendly consoles, suggestions while writing a query, ease of access to connect to various BI platforms to analyze, [and a] more robust system to store a large amount of data. All these functionalities give the better edge to Snowflake.
MarkLogic reduced the amount of time that the DevOps team needed to dedicate to database updates, as the engineering team was mostly able to easily design and maintain database upgrades without requiring specialists such as database architects on the DevOps side. This capability flowed from the product's speed and the versatility of its XQuery language and libraries.
MarkLogic required significant education and buy-in time for the engineering team.
Positive impact: we use Snowflake to track our subscription and payment charges, which we use for internal and investor reporting
Positive impact: 3 times faster query speed compared to Treasure Data means that answers to stakeholders can be delivered quicker by analysts
Positive impact: recommender systems now source their data from Snowflake rather than Spark clusters, improving development speed, and no longer require maintainence of Spark clusters.
