Edison Ong, UpgradeMag.com’s correspondent, contributed to this report.
The explosion of unstructured data which businesses are struggling to leverage is driving organizations to adopt new generation database solutions that can keep pace with the heavy demands of Big Data. This is where the high performance enterprise NoSQL (Not Only SQL) database infrastructure, considered as a workable alternative to the traditional relational databases, comes in.
With growing volumes of unstructured and multi-structured data flooding data centers, the relational databases we’ve relied on for 40-years are now too limiting and inflexible, according to US-based database vendor MarkLogic Corporation.
Jason Hunter, Chief Architect at Marklogic, says new-generation NoSQL databases have gained traction because they are ideally suited to address today’s challenges.
Jason Hunter, Chief Architect, MarkLogic Corp.
MarkLogic is an enterprise-class database, but it uses XML and XQuery instead of SQL. Data is stored as a series of XML documents, particularly those that cannot be disassembled into rows and columns. With XML, the database is capable of managing, indexing and serving up large amounts of unstructured data, from text documents to media files.
Fastest, highest quality search in the industry
MarkLogic has a built-in search, retrieval, and a full suite of application services. Bernard Yu, head of the Philippine operations of MarkLogic Corporation, noted that MarkLogic does search engine indexing of data. When data is placed into the database, MarkLogic indexes it specifically for the search engine. “It wants to make sure queries are fast,” said Yu.
Searching across different data types – text, images, date/time, geospatial, and currencies – from multiple, disparate systems is difficult, Hunter said. “Only when you have the power to search across all your data are you able to get the full value out of your information. MarkLogic has been built to support the fastest, highest quality search in the industry,” he said.
Aside from the integrated “search” function, MarkLogic also boasts of other full-featured development applications and tools such as REST, Java, JSON, SQL, and XQuery that provide the capability for developers to build a variety of applications faster and easier.
MarkLogic supports ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable) transactions which is essential to ensure that all of these are processed reliably. Fully ACID-compliant, MarkLogic offers high availability, disaster recovery, government-grade security, horizontal scaling, rich APIs and share-nothing architecture.
Aside from serving transactional applications, MarkLogic is also useful in analytical application as analytics is also built into the system.
MarkLogic includes a Hadoop connector that will allow customers to “aggregate data inside MarkLogic for richer analytics, while maintaining the advantages of MarkLogic indexes for performance and accuracy,” the company said.
The company has created a suite of enterprise NoSQL solutions for many industries such as content management, data unification and virtualization, hosted publishing solution, metadata catalog, open source intelligence, search and discovery, client onboarding, content authoring and delivery, and digital asset management.
Hunter said that MarkLogic has applications for the government, publishing and media, financial services and insurance, healthcare, aviation, legal, and education sectors.
One of the latest customers of MarkLogic is the BBC, which has improved the performance of its iPlayer video on-demand service after migrating from a legacy relational database system to MarkLogic NoSQL technology.
With the legacy system, it took 30 minutes to an hour to publish a video clip. With MarkLogic’s NoSQL, it took just 200 milliseconds to upload a video clip.
Opportunity in the Philippines
Meanwhile, MarkLogic has spotted an opportunity to sow on Philippine soil its fast, new generation enterprise-level NoSQL (Not Only SQL) Database technology with no other than Hunter leading the drive.
“NoSQL is coming (to the Philippines). It is probably early here,” said Hunter, speaking on the subject “Go Further Faster: An Introduction to Big Data, NoSQL” at the recently-held National Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Summit 2014 in Hotel Intercontinental Manila. “Lots of database coming out now are non-relational. It is inevitable to think of something other than relational.”
In the Philippines, MarkLogic is targeting the government and financial sectors as most of their data are unstructured, said Yu. The company’s current authorized resellers in the Philippines are MISNet, Inc. and Beacon Solutions, Inc.
