MarkLogic- The Swiss Army Knife of data platforms
October 12, 2015

MarkLogic- The Swiss Army Knife of data platforms

Harry Bakken | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

MarkLogic 8.0

Modules Used

  • Search
  • Semantics
  • XQuery API
  • JavaScript API
  • CPF
  • Flexible Replication
  • HA/DR
  • Hadoop Connector
  • Microsoft Office Toolkits
  • SampleStack
  • Query Console
  • Information Studio
  • MLCP
  • Application Server
  • Role-base security

Overall Satisfaction with MarkLogic

Our company is a business partner with MarkLogic. We have a large practice dedicated to MarkLogic and have worked with many of MarkLogic's largest clients in nearly all verticals implement solutions built on MarkLogic. We have broad expertise across all areas of MarkLogic and help companies architect and deliver robust solutions powered by this database platform. We solved all sorts of business problems including publishing work flows, advanced enterprise search, intense big data analytics, and the semantic web. MarkLogic is a powerful platform for enterprise data hubs (operational data warehouses) and business tools. The "out of the box" search capabilities of this tool are unrivaled.
  • MarkLogic does everything well, but search is the "bread and butter" operation. All data is indexed on-the-fly and the API's offer a multitude of ways to create incredibly powerful search applications. The search engine isn't bolted on- it's at the core of the database. Search suggestion, relevance, advanced grammar, spell correction (did you mean?), paginated search over massive numbers of records, etc. is all at the fingertips of the developer. The database scales to massive size and yet search returns sub-second results for the most complex search parameters.
  • High availability, disaster recovery, and scaling is handled incredibly well. In the AWS cloud, it is trivial to set up a MarkLogic system to elastically scale with data and request volume- truly elastic, adding nodes and removing them as needed. Databases can replicate to a remote datacenter in real-time to provide instant cut-over for datacenter loss. Clustered servers provide highly available replication of data to instantly recover from node failures.
  • Security is increasingly important as data takes center stage in an enterprise. MarkLogic's role-based security is baked in to every query. This is battle-hardened content control.
  • Flexibility is unrivaled. Any data can be stored reliably and securely in the MarkLogic database. Records can be stored as text, XML, JSON, or binary. All text, XML, and JSON is instantly indexed and the various strategies for indexing are easy to configured and well documented. MarkLogic is also a powerful semantic triple store. Unlike any other NoSQL solution, MarkLogic can handle full documents, graphs, key-value pairs, binaries, etc. in a single database, providing powerful and unique ways of combining enterprise data.
  • 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.
  • We've had customers who have been able to save their organization hundreds of thousands of dollars by preventing duplication of costly processes. Powerful search capabilities into what different business units had available drives better decisions.
  • Ability to receive content in personalized ways has lead to significant new sales opportunities for some of our customers. This personalization includes on-demand publishing of specific articles on specific topics in addition to recommendation engines and shopping cart analysis.
  • One customer that has an extremely advanced application leveraging nearly every feature MarkLogic has to offer found nearly 3:1 cost savings using MarkLogic when they performed an analysis of projected development and maintenance costs to replicate all their functionality on open source stacks.
There's no other single product that directly compares to all the features that are packed into MarkLogic. Generally speaking, you're looking at a combination of many products to build a stack that competes feature-for-feature. Even if you're leveraging only a limited set of features, the ease of use and robustness of MarkLogic justify the licensing cost differential. TCO makes MarkLogic a better value.
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.
There are few situations where MarkLogic is not well suited, however there's certainly use cases where it is using a missile to swat a fly. Important considerations in the selection process include:

  • Mission critical nature of your data
  • Complexity of your data- do you have polystructured data?
  • Data volume- MarkLogic can handle few records, but it's really meant to house significant volumes of data.
  • Composition of your development team
  • Lifecycle of your system

MarkLogic Support

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.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Slow Initial Response
Yes - Once a verified bug is reported, they have always been good about helping to implement a workaround that gets us unstuck. The permanent fix typically appears in the next release. Your mileage may vary.
I'd say we almost always get exceptional support from MarkLogic. We had a situation on one project where we simply couldn't squeeze the performance out of a query that we needed for our solution. MarkLogic worked with us to provide professional services resources to help. They were able to leverage others within the company and as a team we were able to arrive at a working solution. This wasn't a "run of the mill" scenario. It was extremely advanced, but MarkLogic is committed to helping their customers succeed.

Using MarkLogic

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.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • Search is very elegant, flexible, and powerful.
  • Backups and restore are relatively pain-free. Especially compared to other systems.
  • Query Console is a very powerful tool that helps a new developer understand how to code/interact with the server as well as provides access to data.
  • Installation and upgrading is really easy. System admin is generally easy as well.
  • MarkLogic has made good progress, but the system architecture does complicate deployment as compared to other application servers.
  • Replicating massively large datasets across servers can be tough sometimes. Again, some methods are pretty good, but may not always be feasible. By massive, I mean tens of millions of records, many GB of data, so nothing really does that easily.