Item: MarkLogic Server
Rating: 9
Author: Prabhudayal Acharya

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are searching some restaurants near by any location. We have used the geospatial search feature of MarkLogic. For those who do not know what geopspatial search is the next 3 line is for you. Its search based on geo location using latitude and longitude as parameters. The whole world is divided into some grids by latitude and longitude. Using that feature each and every location can be presented by 2 numbers, one how far and in which direction is it from 00 degree latitude and from 00 longitude. Geospatial search is one of the great features of MarkLogic. It has some in-built features to calculate the distance of a data point from another data point provided that both data have latitude and longitude data present in it. Another features which I like about MarkLogic is - It is really efficient for searching. The time it takes for a search query to run is really less. Thanks to the Indexing and tokenization technique of ML.

Pros and Cons

MarkLogic supports fully ACID transaction and I think this is very rare in a NoSQL system.
The recent version of MarkLogic has Integration with Node.js, REST, JSON which has really made the developers life easier to build integrated systems.
MarkLogic provides superb documentation for us. It really helps to understand which features work how. Example is- the whole dedicated website for it. https://docs.marklogic.com/
From the point of infrastructure - Installation, configuration and deployment is very fast. Compared to RDBMS , it's really easy to scale MarkLogic horizontally by adding nodes.

The licence cost is HIGH.
The amount of space required to store the data seems high hence costly.
The compatibility with legacy system is not yet available. I feel this area needs to be improved very fast.

Return on Investment

Generally speaking, it has positive effects on the product. ROI is kind of ok as the licensing cost is bit higher.
Flexible Data Model and Universal Index features of MarkLogic, will help you for sure in achieve quick ROI. For long term you need to think.

Alternatives Considered

MongoDB and HBase

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.

Other Software Used

Jabber, Anaconda

Likelihood to Renew

Although the price is high the amount of support and flexibility to integrate other systems is also high. It depends on the back-end data too. If it's too critical then its better to renew MarkLogic licence. Migrating to some other opensource platform is difficult in most of the cases. And as always the renewal depends on the management decision which involves cost.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Close to perfect NoSQL DB

Overall Satisfaction with MarkLogic